PLUTO ACADEMY: THE DIMENSIONAL WAR

 

Pluto Academy: The Dimensional War 

Vol II KARLA, To Live and Die on Mars #10 excerpt…

The serpent in his vision was made of static and silence.

Amara stood on his private balcony, the wind tugging at his cape. Below, Corona Hills glittered—a city unaware it was being strangled. The serpent was real, but not for everybody. Only for him. A punishment. A new god’s mocking signature written across the sky where the Twin Serpents had once coiled.

It moved with a slow, cosmic indifference, its black scales drinking the light of Corona. Its body wrapped Mars like a noose, its head eclipsing the sun. The city was cast in perpetual twilight, the smog stained with the color of drowned stars.

Amara’s jaw tightened. The Keri Alu was cold against his brow. Dead metal. The serpents were gone, and this… this was what filled the silence they left behind.

He closed his eyes.

Inside his skull, he reached for the voice. The one that wasn’t his. The demon-god timbre that had commanded crystalline serpents and bent time. The voice of the House of Zemord. The voice of a ruler.

It rose from a place deeper than bone.

“Kneel.”

The word was not sound. It was pressure. A gravity of will that could crack planets. It rolled out of him, through him, aimed at the black serpent coiling through the heavens.

For a heartbeat, nothing.

Then the echo.

It came back not from the sky, but from the inside of his own skull. The same voice. His voice. But distorted. A perfect, mocking reflection, like he’d shouted into a mirror-lined coffin.

“Kneel.”

Amara’s eyes snapped open. The serpent hadn’t flinched. It just was. And now his own command hung in the air between them, a taut wire of defiance.

He tried again, pouring more of himself into it. The weight of his years. The iron of his will.

“This is my sky. You are not welcome here.”

The echo was instantaneous, claustrophobic.

“This is my sky. You are not welcome here.”

He felt it then—the feedback. A psychic loop. His power, turned back on itself. The serpent wasn’t fighting him. It was holding up a mirror. Every ounce of divine fury he projected, it returned, unchanged, trapping him in a dialogue with his own stolen authority.

A cold sweat broke on his neck. This was not a beast to be tamed. It was a principle. A law. The void answering a shout with its own perfect silence.

He reached for the Keri Alu, out of habit. It offered no warmth, no whisper. Just the memory of power.

Below, the city hummed. Life went on. Meetings, crimes, loves, deaths—all under the shadow they couldn’t see. His shadow. His failure given form.

The serpent’s eye, a vast pool of starless black, seemed to focus on him. Not with malice. With recognition.

Amara took a breath. The demon-god voice still churned within him, a storm seeking an outlet. But he locked it down. Swallowed it.

He stopped commanding. He simply looked.

The black serpent stared back.

And in that silent, staring contest between a warlord and a hole in reality, Amara understood the first rule of the new war.

Some things don’t obey.

Some things just are.

And the only voice you hear in the dark is your own, coming back to you, forever.

•••

The fruitless confrontation left a metallic taste in his mouth. Not blood—that, he was used to. This was something else. The bitterness of borrowed power thrown back at him, the claustrophobic echo of his own command. Kneel. Kneel. Kneel.

Amara walked back into his spire suite, the red cape heavy on his shoulders. He shrugged it off, letting it pool on the Kasei metal floor like spilled wine. The city lights, muted by the serpent’s shadow, bled through the viewport and painted the room in shades of drowned violet.

Dino Saurro was already there.

The consigliere filled the far side of the room, a nine-foot-tall monument of primordial muscle and tailored menace. His T-Rex frame was poured into a suit of gunmetal sharkskin, the fabric straining over scales of oiled slate. Ornamental plates of brushed Kasei metal were bolted directly to his hide along his forearms and brow—functional jewelry, their surfaces etched with glowing data-glyphs that pulsed softly with stored memory and quantum processing power. A cigar smoldered between teeth the size of hunting knives, its smoke coiling in the dim light, smelling of earth and expensive poison.

“You look like hell,” Dino rumbled, the sound like continents grinding. He didn’t look at Amara; his reptilian eyes were fixed on the middle distance, reading information directly from the glyphs on his own forearm plates.

“The decor’s lacking,” Amara said, sinking into his throne. The metal groaned. He reached for a decanter, poured two glasses of something dark that smelled of iodine and ozone. He slid one across the desk. It looked like a thimble in Dino’s three-fingered claw.

The lawyer took it, swallowed it in one gulp, and set the empty glass down with a click that threatened the crystal. “As your lawyer,” he began, exhaling a plume of smoke that curled around the data-light from his scales, “this is very concerning.” He tapped a talon against his own metal-plated wrist. A holographic contract, dense with text, flickered into the air between them. “Pluto Academy’s application addendum. Clause 14, subsection G. The ‘Legacy Reclamation Protocol.’” He looked at Amara, his eyes flat and cold. “They own Tommy’s MENU data. Full reproductive and commercial rights. Starting the moment you signed the application. Not if he gets in. When you signed.”

Amara sipped his drink. The liquor was fire and ice. “I read it.”

“Did you?” Dino leaned forward, the chair screaming in protest. The data-glyphs on his plates flared crimson. “This isn’t a mining claim, Amara. This is your son. His neural architecture, his genetic predispositions, his latent telepathic signatures—everything the MENU has ever recorded or projected. They can replicate it. Sell it. Package his potential like cheap synth-whiskey to the highest bidder. They own a piece of his ghost before he’s even made one.”

“I know what a clause is, Dino.”

“Do you?” The lawyer’s dry, dark humor was absent. “Because that’s a right you forfeited the minute you signed your kid up to apply to that school.”

The words hung in the ozone-scented air. Amara looked past him, out the window. The black serpent was a seamless scar across the sky, a void where stars should have been. A new god’s signature.

He thought of Beaky’s Bird Cage. The gilded bars. The way the budgie crime lord had laughed, rich and secure in his fortress, right up until the moment Amara had turned him into golden dust and rewound him back to nothing. He’d taken the seat of power for himself. And now, from a plush office on Pluto, Dean Vexa Krios was exploiting him with the same cold, contractual precision.

The irony was a cold stone in his gut.

Dino pulsed his wrist. The holographic contract dissolved, replaced by a silent news wavecast. Amara’s own face, furious, loomed in the air: GOVERNOR’S FEUD WITH PLUTO ACADEMY IGNITES “DIMENSIONAL WAR” OF WORDS—WHO OWNS OUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE?

The people were scared. They were questioning the establishments that raised their young. Good. Let them question. Let the foundations crack.

But beneath the public scandal, a colder truth gnawed at him. The Twin Serpents were gone. The black serpent, their mocking replacement, did not obey. It simply was. And their promise to him—the one they’d made when he first put on the Keri Alu, when the universe was his to wish upon—felt like a child’s fantasy.

He had asked for an empire.

An empire of air, he’d had—his corporate networks, his whispers in the Menu. An empire of earth—his mines, his constructions, the physical bones of Mars.

But the empire of fire… the empire of pure, unconquerable will, of political and martial dominion that would make him untouchable… that, they had promised.

If their promise is true, he thought, staring into his glass, then the destiny I chose is inevitable. The empire is coming. It must be.

But the Serpents were silent. The crown was cold. And the only voice in the dark was his own, coming back to him, forever.

Dino stubbed out his cigar in the empty glass. The ceramic cracked. The data-glyphs on his plates cycled through a cool, analytical blue. “So. What’s the play, Governor? We can fight the clause. It’ll cost you. Publicly. Or we can make Vexa Krios an offer he can’t litigate.”

Amara set his glass down. He looked at the news feed, at his own snarling hologram. Then he looked at the serpent in the sky.

“We don’t make offers,” Amara said, his voice quiet, final. “We send a message.”

He stood, the Keri Alu a dead weight on his brow.

“Draft the declaration. We’re not disputing the clause.” A slow, terrible smile spread across his face. “We’re disputing the Academy’s right to exist. This isn’t a lawsuit.”

He turned, his shadow swallowing the light from the dying city.

“It’s a dimensional war. And I intend to burn their dimension to the ground.”

•••

Amara watched the city through the viewport, the black serpent a still and silent companion against the bruised sky. The argument with Celeste still echoed in the silent suite, her words carving deeper than any plasma blade.

You’re a ghost in your own home. Our son doesn’t know you.

He’d left her standing in their bedroom, the air between them thick with the unsaid. The trauma of the public scandal had calcified around her, a shell he couldn’t crack. She raised Tommy alone, a war fought in the quiet hours while he waged his on a galactic scale. The application to Pluto Academy had been the longest stretch of time he’d ever spent with the boy—his clone, his mirror, his failure. And in doing so, he’d signed away a piece of Tommy’s soul to Vexa Krios.

The Keri Alu was ice against his brow. No whispers. No guidance. Just the memory of power and the echo of his own commands thrown back at him by the void. Kneel.

He poured another glass of the dark liquor, the decanter nearly empty. Dino had left, the scent of his expensive cigar lingering like a threat. The declaration of war was being drafted. A dimensional war. The words felt hollow in his mouth.

He was a man who built empires. But the empire of fire, of pure dominion, the one the Serpents had promised… that crown was cold.

He thought of Tommy, volatile and brutal, molded in his image. He thought of the boy’s face when the Dean had dissolved, a mixture of horror and awe. Is that what I’m teaching him? That strength is the only language? That love is a weakness to be armored against?

Celeste was right. He was a ghost. A specter haunting the halls of his own life, more present for his enemies than for his family. The intimacy they’d once had was buried under public shame and private retribution, a casualty of the war he’d chosen to fight.

He walked to the viewport, placing his palm against the cool glass. The serpent stared back, its starless eye a perfect void.

Some things don’t obey.

Some things just are.

And perhaps, he thought with a bitterness that tasted like ash, some wars aren’t fought across dimensions or star systems. Perhaps the most brutal war is the one fought across a bedroom, in the silence between two people who’ve forgotten how to speak. A war where the only casualty is a family, and the only victory is a deeper, more profound loneliness.

He made his choice. He would burn Pluto Academy’s dimension to the ground. He would wage his war.

But as he turned from the window, the ghost of his wife’s silence followed him, a colder and more desolate void than any serpent could ever conjure.

•••

The silence of the deep desert was a physical presence. Not an absence of sound, but a quantum stillness, the air so dry it drank vibrations before they could form. The only hum was the low, resonant frequency of the Neptune V’s memory—a psychic imprint left in the space its physical form had occupied for seven hours, now digitized and stored in Lumo’s partitioned Menu vault. To any scan, there were just empty dunes.

Ari sat on nothing. Or rather, he sat in the habitual posture for the pilot’s throne that wasn’t there. His boots dug into rust-colored sand. His body remembered the curve of the couch that lined the oval wall of the saucer’s single room. 

All that remained was a faint smell of ozone and Fozi’s fur, clinging to the air like a stubborn ghost. He uncorked his last canteen. The water inside didn’t taste like rust. It tasted like processing.

“Transmission was wrong,” Fozi stated, his burgundy fur collecting lithium-white dust. His eyes were closed, processing subsonic resonance from the deep rock. “No water-memory here. Just deleted stone.”

Ren materialized from the heat haze, his Grey Martian form a distortion in the light. He hadn’t been walking. He’d been elsewhere, telepathically skimming the data-scarred upper atmosphere. His telepathic voice brushed their minds, cool and smooth. “El pozo estaba aquí. A rich man’s son died in it. The father paid to have the location scrubbed from the land-Menu. The water forgot to be here.”

Ari spat the tasteless water onto the sand, where it vanished instantly, repurposed by the desiccated ground. “Great. So we’re dying of thirst because Lumo’s off with a rich man and we can’t get water from a well because it got deleted because a rich man’s son died. Poetic.” His gold chain was the only thing that felt real, a solid weight against his sternum.

The shape that appeared on the shimmering horizon didn’t walk. It stuttered.

One moment, empty air. The next, a figure, mid-fall. Then a blur, as if skipping frames. It was a corruption in the desert’s rendering.

Ari was on his feet, a reflex with no weapon to follow it. His HEART MENU, low on charge, flickered a weak combat protocol across his vision. Fozi’s claws unsheathed with a sound like ceramic scraping stone. Ren simply turned, his black eyes becoming pools of absolute focus.

The figure resolved. A Corona Police rookie. His physical uniform was pristine—a statement of wealth, to keep matter permanently manifested. But it was glitching at the edges, pixelating in the heat. His face was a mask of raw, synaptic terror. He wasn’t scanning the desert; he was staring at the internal feed of his own MENU, watching something replay.

He saw them.

His hand didn’t go to a belt. His fingers spasmed into a clumsy gesture—index finger extended, thumb up—the somatic trigger for a standard-issue plasma sidearm. His HEART MENU flared above his wrist, projecting the weapon’s targeting glyph. But the energy that crackled around his fingertip was unstable, spitting pink and gray static. A corrupted download.

“S-stay back!” he screamed, his voice scratching. “Boulder trash! I knew you’d track the wave!”

Ari didn’t move. He let his hands hang loose. “Boulder Gang?” He let the words drip with contempt. “Those analog losers? They still wear paint. We don’t do costumes.”

The rookie’s MENU flickered, his terror warring with pattern recognition. He saw Ari’s chain, Fozi’s primal mass, Ren’s impossible calm. These didn’t match the Boulder’s crude, thuggish signatures. His arm wavered. The plasma fizzled out.

“They… they have a den,” the rookie choked out, his bravado collapsing into a sob of relief and exhaustion. “East. In the Chromium Chasm. They blew my resonator… my memory of the way home. They were laughing. Said Pitt would be proud.”

The name hit the air like a struck bell.

Ari’s eyes met Fozi’s. Ren’s telepathic nudge was a needle of cold interest.

“Pitt,” Ari repeated, flat. “He’s their boss now?”

The rookie hugged himself, his physical uniform absorbing his shivers. “They kept saying his name. But also that he took off. They seemed desperate, lost without him.”

A slow, terrible smile spread across Ari’s face. He looked at his crew. “You hear that? The Boulder God has abandoned his congregation.” He turned back to the rookie. “Show us.”

•••

The V’al house clung to the canyon wall like a fossil. Below, the private valleys of Brittany Hills were pools of shadow, the tops of imported pines a still, black sea under the bruised Martian twilight. The air was cold and smelled of wet stone and pine resin, scrubbed clean by the family’s discreet atmospheric units.

Karla stood on the remote balcony, the wind off the lithium plains tugging at the hem of her simple tunic. The family dinner was a minefield of curated glances and unspoken history in the main house behind her. She’d felt the emotional wave an hour ago—a subtle, persistent pressure against her mind, like a thumbprint on glass. A familiar signature.

He appeared without sound. A holographic transmission, rendered in perfect, solid-seeming fidelity. Lumo. He leaned against the balcony railing beside her, a cobalt-blue ghost in the twilight. His four eyes were fixed not on the view, but on her.

“You’re vibrating like a plucked string,” he said, his voice a direct neural whisper.

A smile touched her lips before she could stop it. “You felt that?” Her own voice was softer than she’d used all day. “Across all that psychic noise?”

“Your signal’s the only one I have bookmarked.” He uncrossed his arms, the gesture oddly vulnerable for a projection. “Tough crowd in there?”

Karla exhaled, the tension in her shoulders easing just at the sight of him. “The V’al specialty. Chilled champagne and warm judgments.” She glanced toward the great room. Her mother was a silhouette against the fire, a regent holding court. Her sisters, orbiting. “It’s the first time since he died. It feels… archaeological. Like we’re dusting off the old exhibit.”

Lumo followed her gaze. The secret sat in his mind like a black sun, warping everything around it. Amara is your father. He knew. He’d traced the impossible lineage hidden in her code, seen the architecture of a lie built over decades. He’d wanted to confront the Countess, to demand the truth, but the fear of what it would do to Karla—to the new life they’d made—had frozen him. He could not be the one to detonate her world.

“Your father’s memory,” Lumo said carefully, anchoring himself in the adoptive truth. “The deer bust in the library. It’s a quiet kind of preservation.”

Karla leaned back against the stone, watching him. “It’s a preserved head. His final menu in a dead animal. It’s the most V’al thing imaginable.” She shook her head, a strand of hair catching the light from the house. “Why does walking into that room feel like surrendering?”

Lumo’s transmission was so still it seemed to freeze the pixels of the world around it. “Because you’re not who you were when you left. You’re carrying the future. That changes the gravity of the past.”

The words, the sheer unwavering certainty of his support, washed over her. It was almost terror, this feeling. This man, who had dismantled her defenses not with grand gestures but with a brutal, brilliant constancy. Who saw her completely. Who had given her a child. His presence in her life felt less like a choice and more like a fundamental law of her universe, recently discovered.

“Who are you?” The question wasn’t harsh. It was awed. Overwhelmed.

Lumo’s head tilted. “Why are you scared?”

The truth tumbled out, raw and unvarnished. “I’m scared,” she whispered, the confession carried away by the canyon wind, “because I always waited for you, even if I didn’t know you were going to enter my life.”

She looked down into the swallowing dark, her next words a vow etched in the quiet between them. “No one knows the suffering I went through. And if they don’t accept you in my life, then they are the suffering I went through.”

The transmission held its form, but she felt the reaction—a surge of fierce, protective warmth that had no holographic equivalent. He said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t be a lie or a confession.

From the house, the sharp, bright sound of crystal shattering cut the night. A peal of forced laughter followed.

Karla pushed off the railing, squaring her shoulders. The moment of quiet was over. She looked at his flickering image, a lifeline in the dark. “Don’t go far,” she said, her voice regaining its familiar, wry edge.

Lumo’s image began to fray, the immense processing power diverted to some other crisis in the unfolding war. “I’m a wave away,” he said, his voice stretching thin. “Even when I’m not.”

He vanished. The balcony was just stone and cold air again.

Karla turned her back on the dark and faced the golden light. She walked toward the house, toward the curated history and silent judgments, her hand resting for a fleeting second on the gentle, impossible curve of her stomach. She was not walking in alone.

•••

The silence of the Boulder hideout was the first red flag.

The Chromium Chasm was a scar in the earth, walls gleaming with unstable crystalline deposits that refracted the smog-light into migraine-inducing rainbows. The hideout was a half-collapsed mining rig from the early terraforming days, its metal bones rusted to the color of dried blood. There were no sentries. No glint of watchful eyes in the shadows. Just the low, mournful whistle of wind through fractured rock.

Ari stood at the entrance, his gold chain still. Fozi sniffed the air, his burgundy fur bristling. “No fresh paint. No shit-talking.” His voice was a low rumble. “Smells like fear and stale protein.”

Ren floated forward, his black eyes scanning the dark maw of the main tunnel. “Pitt no está aquí. His odor is… cold.”

Lumo had gone ahead, slipping away on a muttered excuse about checking the eastern ridge for water seepage. Again.

Ari spat into the dust. “Blue’s off chasing ghosts. Let’s see what’s left of the Boulder’s pride.”

They moved in, a well-oiled machine of quiet violence. The interior was a testament to pathetic decline. Crude holographic tags of Pitt’s snarling face—the Demon Gang’s sigil—were slapped over the old Boulder Gang murals, but the digiton paint was already peeling. Makeshift bunks were strewn with empty ration packs and broken gear. The air reeked of unwashed bodies and the metallic tang of cheap plasma burns.

In the central chamber, they found the Boulder.

Or what was left of them.

A dozen thugs, their faces still smeared with the gang’s signature mineral pigments, huddled around a dead heating unit. Their clothes were singed, skin blistered from a recent, brutal encounter. One was trying to use a basic healing tool—a cheap, subscription-based digiton applicator that glitched erratically, doing more harm than good.

“Come on, you piece of shit,” the thug whimpered, slapping the device. “Renew, damn you!”

Their leader, a hulking brute named Crater, looked up. His eyes, once full of stupid arrogance, were hollow. He saw Ari, Fozi, Ren. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He just sighed.

“Bandits.” The word was flat. “Come to finish the job?”

Ari leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “What job? Looks like someone already mopped the floor with you.”

Crater’s shoulders slumped. “Demons. Pitt’s boys. They came through last night. Said we were squatting on Demon turf. Took our last cache of digitons. Laughed.” He spat a glob of phlegm tinged pink. “Said Pitt would’ve been proud of ‘em for cleaning up the trash.”

Fozi grunted. “Where is he? Your green hero?”

A bitter laugh echoed through the chamber. Another thug, her arm wrapped in filthy bandages, answered. “Gone. Took off after that big score went sideways. Left us holding this rusted-out shit-hole. Said he was ‘ascending.’” She made a crude gesture. “Ascended right out of the fucking picture.”

The confirmation landed with a dull thud. Pitt had cut them loose. The Boulder Gang was a corpse, still twitching because no one had told the nerves to stop firing.

Ari felt no triumph. Just a profound, weary disgust. “So you’re just… waiting here? For what? A miracle? Another beating?”

“We got nowhere else to go,” Crater muttered, staring at his hands.

It was then that Lumo returned.

He didn’t walk in. He zapped through the far wall, a canteen of freshly condensed water in his hand, his four eyes immediately taking in the scene. He looked from the broken Boulders to his crew.

Ari rounded on him, the frustration of the pointless search, the pathetic spectacle before them, boiling over. “You’re fucking stupid, where did you think I was going? Scouting? You completely cut off our menus when you left!”

Lumo’s expression was cold, pragmatic. “I did it for your safety. A full Menu signature in a dead zone is a beacon.”

“Well you always leave all the time!” Ari shot back, the old resentment surfacing. “Now we know you just as the guy who leaves.”

The wounded Boulder thugs watched the exchange with dull curiosity, like spectators at a play they couldn’t understand.

Lumo ignored them, holding out the canteen to Ari. “Drink. The water’s clean. Processor’s working.”

Ari swatted it away. The canteen clattered to the floor. “We don’t need water! We needed to know if Pitt was here! He’s not! He’s gone, and these idiots are all that’s left!” He gestured at the pitiful scene. “The Boulder are no more. They’re just… meat waiting to be recycled.”

As if on cue, one of the thugs’ healing tools chimed, a soft, pleasant sound. The green indicator light glowed steady. The man let out a sob of relief. “Subscription’s active! Oh thank the stars…”

The Bandits stared. The Boulder were hoping their healing tool subscription kicks in. This was the rock bottom they’d heard about.

Silence descended, heavier than the chasm’s stone. There was nothing here. No enemy to fight. No score to take. Just the ashes of a rival gang and the echo of their own aimlessness.

“Let’s go,” Ari said, his voice drained. “This place smells like failure.”

They turned to leave. As they passed Lumo, he didn’t move. He was staring at his own right foot, a strange, distant look in his four eyes.

“Lumo,” Ari said, impatient. “Move.”

“I have a memory in my right toe,” Lumo said, his voice curiously blank.

Ari and Fozi exchanged a glance. Ren hovered closer.

“What?” Ari asked, irritation warring with intrigue.

Lumo didn’t elaborate. He simply pulsed a command through his Menu. A small, localized hologram flickered from the data-port embedded in his boot.

It was a logo. Chromatic, sleek, professional. SAIPAN. Written in elegant, flowing script beneath a minimalist, happy Japanese anime girl character waving cheerfully.

The Bandits stared. It was utterly alien in this grim, rusted context.

“What is SAIPAN?” Ari asked, the name unfamiliar on his tongue.

Lumo’s eyes were wide, fixed on the logo with a mixture of awe and horror. “Spectral Algorithmic Intelligence for Panpsychic Assault Nexus.” The words rolled out of him, technical, precise. “You know… the system I was developing. The combat protocol. The chromatic tiers.” He looked up, meeting their confused stares. “But I never… told anyone the name. Not the full name. And I certainly never made no fucking logo.”

The cheerful anime girl waved silently in the gloom of the derelict hideout, a splash of impossible color in a world of dust and despair. A piece of a puzzle, appearing in the wrong place, at the wrong time. A memory that wasn't his, planted in his flesh.

The Boulder Gang was forgotten. The silence that followed now was of a different, deeper kind.

They filed out of the stinking chamber, leaving the Boulder to their flickering healing tools and slow, subscription-based misery. The acrid air of the chasm was a relief.

“Pathetic,” Ari muttered, kicking a loose chunk of crystal. It skittered into the shadows, clinking against something metallic. “All that noise, all that paint… for this. A bunch of burnt losers waiting for a corporate app to decide if they get to keep their skin.”

The metallic clink was followed by a soft, rising whine.

Ari froze. “Oh, you gotta be—”

The plasma bomb was a weak, homemade thing—more flash than fire, the kind of low-yield trap a desperate, amateur crew plants. It detonated with a concussive THUMP and a burst of searing white light.

The Bandits were thrown back against the rusted rig wall. Not dead. Not even critically injured. Just… thoroughly singed.

Ari pushed himself up, his clothes smoking, the ends of his hair crisped. The smell of his own burnt jacket filled his nostrils. A wave of pure, undiluted rage turned his vision red. He spun, fists clenched, ready to march back in and turn those Boulder bastards into paste for the insult.

He took one step.

Then he stopped.

He heard it—the faint, pathetic weeping from inside. The sound of men praying to a billing algorithm.

The rage drained out of him, leaving behind a cold, hollow understanding. He looked at his own smoldering sleeves, at Fozi brushing embers from his fur, at Ren’s slightly blackened carapace.

“Forget it,” Ari said, his voice flat. “They’re not worth the energy. Killing them would be a mercy. Let ‘em rot.”

He turned to Lumo, who was examining a scorch mark on his own forearm. “So. This healing tool. When’s it kick in?”

Lumo didn’t meet his eyes. He coughed, a surprisingly sheepish sound from the usually unflappable Xerran. “It’s, uh… it’s a subscription service. Basic corp-med package. The nanites activate… if the monthly payment clears the account.”

The words hung in the smoky air.

Ari stared at him. Then he let out a single, sharp bark of laughter that held no humor. The irony was a physical weight, pressing down on his singed shoulders. They’d just walked out of a den of pathetic, abandoned thugs, only to stand there, themselves scorched and bleeding, hoping the exact same faceless, merciless system would deem them worthy of repair.

They weren’t the hunters. They were just slightly luckier scavengers, still trapped in the same cage. The fight for Hite felt a million miles away.

•••

The digitized mask Karla wore was called Lamentations of the Moons—a ceremonial façade of weeping jade and shimmering, scripted light that moved with the grace of a funeral dance. It was the height of fashionable penitence. And it was strangling her from the inside out, a neural-linked masterpiece of social contrition. It was crushing Karla’s soul. She moved through her Glasslake Park homecoming, the venue itself a fluke of fate; the Bandits’ war with the Boulder Gang had diverted municipal funds, butterfly-effecting this very gathering of the elite into existence. Destiny, it seemed, had a sense of irony.

Lumo’s transmission was a ghost in her ear, her only anchor. She greeted every guest, a specter of perfect penance, until she stood across the room from none other than Countess Horsifesse. The equine noble’s eyes held a well-bred storm.

Karla’s stomach turned to ice. The Vernal Gala. The virtual circle. Her own infamous, rebellious refusal to sit. She’d thought it a statement. It had triggered a cascading nervous-system collapse in the Countess, a woman whose engineered equine lineage made her physiology… sensitive. The media wave had been brutal. KC’s Cruelty Cripples Countess.

“Fuck,” Karla whispered, the mask translating it into a demure cough.

Language, my dear, Lumo’s transmission chided, but she felt his phantom hand squeeze hers. Do what you have to do. I’m here.

The Countess cut through the crowd like a shard of expensive glass. She was magnificent and terrifying—tall, with the powerful haunches and elegant, elongated neck of her genetic template, her face a striking, beautiful hybrid of human and thoroughbred aristocracy. Her eyes, large and liquid, were fixed on Karla with an emotion beyond anger: a profound, personal betrayal.

“Countess,” Karla began, the mask shaping her words into a sigh of silvered regret. “For my actions at the Vernal Gala, for the distress caused to you and your illustrious house… I offer my formal and profound apology.”

The Countess drew herself up, her elegant neck arching. "You think a few pretty words can brush away such a stain?" she began, her voice rising with a fluttering, tremulous outrage. "The audacity to speak of my lineage as if it were some... some cabaret act! To reduce generations of—Hnn-gh! Hnn-gh! Hnn-gh!—of careful, noble design to a punchline!"

"Countess," Karla said, the mask weaving her shame into visible silver threads. "My mockery of your genetic heritage—the thoughtless words about your... equine grace—were beneath even the gutter press. To joke of one's lineage is to spit on the architects of one's soul. I apologize."

Before the Countess could reply, the world broke.

The grand doors didn’t open—they un-rendered. Corona Police flooded the static gap, flanked by Intelligence: an albino man with eyes of cold fire and a reptilian humanoid scanning the crowd. The albino’s voice was a digital winter. “Karla V’al. You are remanded for temporal violations and neural sedition. Do not resist.”

The Lamentations of the Moons glitched, a stutter of raw panic.

Across the room, Countess Horsifesse’s shock melted into a look of pure, radiant satisfaction. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. Her smile was a verdict.

In Karla’s ear, Lumo’s transmission vanished into dead air. He was gone. Mortification, cold and absolute, swallowed her whole. The mask held its beautiful, sorrowful shape, a perfect lie as the world ended.

•••

The talk show's holographic booth hovered above Corona Hills' central transit loop, a shimmering, glassy bubble of curated chaos. Inside, Flixx, a Jovian with too many expressive eyestalks, and Jax, a human whose face was a roadmap of old street-fights and good humor, leaned into their laps. Below, a river of commuters flowed—hover-pods, trams, a few actual foot-traffic nostalgists—their collective MENU feeds feeding the show's energy like a psychic battery.

"...and we all remember in our history wave," Flixx was saying, his voice a smooth, multi-tonal purr designed to soothe and incite in equal measure, "the Pluto Academy dates back to the pre-calendar feudal age, when lords were running shit and if you didn’t belong to a house, well, you weren’t going very far. Now, Dean Krios comes from one of those old lunar lines, right? The kind that thinks governance is a genetic trait."

Jax snorted, adjusting his headset. "Genetic trait? Brother, they think breathing is a privilege they grant us. And our esteemed Governor-nominee, Mr. 'I-Built-This-Planet-With-My-Bare-Hands' Amara? He's the guy who crashed through the ceiling. No ladder, just fist. Now he's findin' out the ceiling's made of contracts, not plaster."

The audience—a million minds jacked into the wave—rippled with laughter and agreement. The public feud between Amara and Vexa Krios was the best entertainment since the last orbital gladiator match. It felt like sport. But beneath the banter, a cold undercurrent hummed. The laws of the jungle—territory, strength, possession—were seeping into the civic dialogue. The fabric of civilization, woven from digiton law and Menu-based etiquette, was quietly fraying at the edges. Mars was watching a live feud between titans, and the lingering threat of disaster hung in the air, invisible as the black serpent only one man could see.

Suddenly, the broadcast feed glitched. A violent, unauthorized static snow ripped across the shared mental channel, followed by a bass frequency that vibrated in the teeth.

Then, he was there.

Angelo Amara’s holographic form materialized inside their talk show booth, shattering the intimate bubble. He wasn't a polite caller on a screen; he was a mountain of muscle and metal suddenly sharing their oxygen. His red cape was a splash of violence against the pastel studio backdrop. The Kasei metal of his skull-plate gleamed.

Flixx’s eyestalks recoiled in unison. Jax choked on his synth-coffee.

The planetary audience gasped as one.

Amara ignored them. He was looking at Jax with an expression of startling, unguarded interest. "You were saying about the pre-calendar period," Amara boomed, his voice thankfully modulated down from its usual arena-shaking volume. It was still the sound of continents grinding. "You're not wrong. But you're missing the texture."

He leaned forward, a predator sharing a secret. "Yes, the middle period. My boy, in those days even a slave belonged to a house."

The silence was absolute. The Governor-nominee, the warlord, was not only listening to their gossip show—he was a fan. His defences were utterly down. He came across not as a god, but as a startlingly relatable man of history, despite the booming voice and the public stature that could crush moons.

Jax found his voice, a croak. "Governor... you're... you're on Waves & Vibes."

"I am," Amara said, as if stating the weather. "It's a good show. You make people think while they commute. It's... civilized." He said the word like it was a fragile, exotic artifact.

They discussed the feudal period for a few more minutes—Amara’s knowledge was deep, granular, focused on systems of control and loyalty. The chat was electrifying. Ratings were achieving escape velocity.

But as Amara spoke, a silent call echoed in the private channel of his mind. Not a voice. A presence. A void. The black serpent, coiling around the unseen edges of his consciousness. In the middle of a joke about land-barons, Amara’s eyes lost focus for a microsecond.

He realized he had no friends.

He knew it now, in his bones, a truth gifted by the void. Beaky was a traitor. Mul belonged to a different sect. Mikkub was an ally of convenience, a wary king. Dino was a lawyer. The Bandits were useful tools. Celeste was a ghost in his own home. Tommy was a mirror of his worst traits.

He was alone at the summit. The loneliness was a colder vacuum than space.

The serpent’s call was a pull toward oblivion. Or clarity. He wasn't sure yet.

He cut the transmission abruptly, his hologram winking out with a final, "Keep asking the hard questions, boys."

The booth was silent. Flixx and Jax stared at each other.

"Did that just happen?" Jax whispered.

Across the city, in a private box at the Grand Arena, Amara’s physical body stood before a roaring crowd of thousands, both physically present and virtually linked. The rally was a symphony of light and sound. He raised his hands for silence, the Keri Alu cold on his brow.

His voice, when it came, was stripped of all its earlier relatability. It was raw, granite, laced with a pain so vast it had become a weapon.

"...and let me tell you this," he thundered, his gaze sweeping over the adoring, fearful faces. "No one knows the suffering I went through to stand before you. The blood, the betrayal, the silence." He paused, letting the weight crush them. "And if they failed to vote to nominate me for Governor in the coming election..."

He leaned into the audience, his eyes burning with a promise that was also a threat.

"...then they are the suffering I went through."

The crowd erupted. Not just in cheers, but in a wave of empathetic, terrified devotion. He had transfigured their potential rejection into an extension of his own mythic pain. It was political genius. It was spiritual extortion.

As the decibel level peaked, Amara’s mind was already elsewhere. The serpent’s call. A secret betrayal. The chilling loneliness.

And one clear, simple want cutting through the cosmic static: He wanted to repair things with Mikkub.

The dimensional war with Pluto Academy would be fought with time and fire. But some wars, he was starting to understand, required a different kind of weapon. Perhaps even a handshake.

The talk show hosts, now babbling in stunned delight to their global audience, had no idea they’d just hosted a man staring into two abysses at once: one in the sky, one in his own soul. The jungle’s laws were indeed creeping in. And its alpha predator was just realizing how cold the peak could be.

•••

The hold of the Neptune V was quiet. Fozi sat against the bulkhead, his burgundy fur matted where a plasma burn was slowly knitting itself closed. Ren floated nearby, a hairline fracture in his carapace sealing with a soft, cellular hum.

Their monthly healing subscription had renewed. The deep tissue damage from the last job was being systematically undone by the basic corporate medical plan their stolen MENU access provided. It was slow. It was inelegant. But it was free.

It was also a mark of shame.

The legendary score from the Underground City—the one that was supposed to set them up for life—was gone. Siphoned away by Pitt, by Slithery Snake, by fate. They were still poor. Too poor for the premium, instantaneous cellular rebuild. They endured the dull, persistent ache of their bodies fixing themselves, a constant reminder of their failure.

To pass the time, they were eating Sliggos. The radioactive green slugs were a street-vendor delicacy, a legal narcotic that left a pleasant, buzzing numbness on the tongue. Fozi swallowed his whole, the gelatinous form bulging in his throat before sliding down. Lumo chewed his slowly, feeling the mild psychic fuzz at the edges of his vision.

A private alert pulsed through their shared MENU frequency—a channel Lumo had hardwired for emergencies. It was Ari, but his vitals read calm. Too calm.

On their internal displays, a window flickered to life. It showed a first-person view from Ari’s perspective. He wasn’t with them. He was sitting on a rusted bench perched on a cliff edge overlooking the Mariner Valley, the vast, lithium-tinted ocean churning silently below. His hands were empty, resting on his knees. His gold chain was a dull gleam against his neck. His back was to the camera, his face hidden, but his voice, when it came, was piped cleanly into their audio feed.

They heard the click of a connection, the warble of a secured line being forced open.

A gruff, rasping voice answered, distorted by cheap encryption. “The hell? This line is scorched. Who is this?”

Ari’s voice was flat, devoid of its usual manic energy. It was the quiet after the explosion. “It’s your favorite clown, Pitt.”

A beat of stunned silence from the other end. Then, a disbelieving laugh. “Ari? How’d you get this wave? This is a private—”

“I’m in your network, you green son of a bitch,” Ari interrupted, his tone not boasting, just stating a fact. “I’m in your payroll files. Your shipping manifests. I’m looking at the receipt for that ugly gold-plated skiff you’re so proud of.”

The Bandits watched the feed, frozen. Fozi put his half-eaten Sliggo down. Ren’s hovering form went perfectly still.

Pitt’s laughter died. “You’re digging your own grave, street rat. You think this is a game?”

“No,” Ari said, his voice dropping lower, laced with a profound, weary exhaustion. It was the sound of a man who had been kicked one too many times, who had finally decided to stop falling and start swinging back. “I think it’s a declaration. You took my face. You took my score. You used a wormhole to cheat because you knew you couldn’t win a straight fight.”

“I won, didn’t I?” Pitt sneered, but the bravado was thin, undercut by the unnerving calm on the other end of the line.

Ari was silent for a long moment, just staring out at the alien sea, a lone figure against the immensity of Mars. When he spoke again, the exhaustion was still there, but beneath it was something harder, colder, a finality that made the air in the Neptune V feel thin.

“You listen to me, you green motherfucker. You keep testing me. You keep thinking there’s a line I won’t cross.” He took a slow, audible breath. “Don’t clown me, bitch.”

The words landed not as a shouted threat, but as a quiet, deadly promise. The irony was a sharpened blade. Clown face. Pitt’s favorite taunt, thrown back at him not as an insult, but as a warning of a role reversal. Ari was no longer the jester; he was the ringmaster of Pitt’s impending ruin.

The line was silent. They could almost hear Pitt’s gold fangs grinding together.

“The fight for Hite is over,” Ari stated, his voice final. “The war for the summit starts now. I see you, Pitt. Every transaction. Every move. The next time we meet, I’m not taking my face back. I’m taking everything else.”

He severed the connection.

The audio feed cut out. The video window remained for a second longer, showing Ari’s solitary back against the vast, bruised Martian sky, before it too winked away.

In the hold, the only sound was the low hum of the ship’s systems and the slow, stubborn knitting of their own flesh. Fozi picked up his Sliggo and took another bite. The holiday was over. The Sliggo buzz was a small comfort. Ari’s declaration hung in the air, a debt that would now be paid in full.

•••

The Dimensional War had begun not with plasma fire, but with a silent, calculated removal.

Governor Amara stood before the shimmering, opulent facade of the Pluto Academy’s Martian entrance in the wealthy green neighborhood of Corona’s academy district. The manicured lawns and crystalline fountains were a lie—a pleasant mask for the wormhole door to a school that thought it could own his son’s future. He raised a hand, his Kasei metal gauntlet glinting.

With a thought, he deactivated the security icons.

These were no ordinary scanners or force fields. They were his own designs, intricate constructs of digiton logic and Zemord-charged will he had embedded into the local reality to monitor the Academy’s pulse. As they dissolved—not with a bang, but with a soft, sighing unravel of light—the flaw was revealed.

The planetary server known as Erhas, whose physical quantum heart beat within a wing of this very campus, experienced a catastrophic logic loop. It was a public utility, a piece of the planetary consciousness, and it had been quietly, unknowingly, storing a corrupted memory packet—a leftover echo from some forgotten, pre-terraforming scan of deep space. With Amara’s proprietary buffers gone, the system hiccuped. It attempted to purge the error.

Instead, it rendered it.

The air above the central quad split with a sound like tearing silk. Students and faculty in flowing academic robes froze, their Menus overloading with panic glyphs.

From the rift, it spilled out: Eccleses.

It was a horror of mismatched biology and glitching matter, a beast of stored memory given monstrous flesh. Its form was unstable—one moment a many-legged crustacean of black chitin, the next a serpentine coil of iridescent scales, its edges pixelating in the smog-light. A single, compound eye, like a fractured camera lens, swiveled and took in the screaming crowd. It did not roar. It emitted a high-frequency data-screech that shattered glass and sent neural interfaces into seizure.

Then it fed.

It was not a messy consumption. It was a clean, terrifying deletion. A tendril of staticky light would lash out, touch a fleeing student, and their form would simply un-render, dissolving into a cloud of golden digitons that the beast inhaled. Three, four, five campus dwellers were gone before the first security drone arrived. Its plasma bolts passed harmlessly through the creature’s shifting form.

Amara watched from a discreet distance, his face a mask of cold observation. The chaos was perfect. The fear was absolute. The Academy’s inviolable safety was a joke.

He stepped forward.

His arrival was not subtle. The Keri Alu on his brow flared to life, casting a stark, white light. Time stuttered around him, slowing the beast’s next lunge to a crawl. All eyes, physical and virtual via a million linked Menus, turned to him.

He did not attack.

He summoned his Menu. But not a combat protocol. A utility interface. A giant, holographic control panel materialized in the air before him, sleek and professional, utterly at odds with the primal terror on the ground. It looked like a sound mixing board crossed with a genetic sequencer.

“Let’s see what you’re made of,” Amara boomed, his voice amplified by the Keri Alu. His fingers danced across the glowing sliders and dials.

He tuned the Frequency of Existence dial down. The Eccleses flickered, becoming semi-transparent. He adjusted the Aggression Algorithm slider to zero. The beast froze, its data-screech cutting off. He isolated the Memory Core and executed a targeted purge.

The creature convulsed. Its form stabilized, shrinking, compacting. The malevolent intelligence in its eye faded, replaced by a docile, blank glow. Within a minute, it sat on the manicured grass, the size of a large hound, passively humming.

The silence was deafening.

Amara dismissed the menu. He placed a foot on the subdued creature’s back, a conqueror’s pose. He addressed the cameras, the stunned survivors, the entire planet watching the feed.

“You see?” His voice was calm, laden with grim authority. “The universe beyond our atmosphere is not just empty void and resource rocks. It is wild. It is hungry. It stores nightmares in the memory of dead stars. The institutions you trust to keep you safe…” he gestured contemptuously at the Academy’s spires, “…cannot even keep their own servers clean.”

He paused, letting the accusation hang.

“My holdings across the galaxy—Amaracorp’s exoplanet ventures—are not merely for profit. They are a frontier. A firewall. They are how we colonize, how we tame these threats before they find their way to our gardens.” He kicked the pacified Eccleses lightly. “This… glitch… is a proof of concept. My capability is Mars’s security.”

He then raised a fist, his gaze sharpening, aiming at the unseen billions.

“But security requires unity. Strength. Tomorrow, in the Grand Arena, I will be joined by Mike Mikkub. Together, we will demonstrate the martial and economic unity required for this new age. We will put this beast’s digiton value to public use. Every citizen who invests in our combined venture stock before the rally will share in the jackpot we unleash.”

A feral, political grin spread across his face.

“I publicly call Mike Mikkub to stand with me. To show Mars that its greatest sons do not squabble while monsters lick at the door. We will turn fear into fortune. Let the galaxy send its worst. We will bank it.”

The transmission cut.

Across Mars, stock tickers for Amaracorp and Mikkub Holdings went berserk. A feeding frenzy of a different kind began. The dimensional war was no longer a war of words. Amara had just brought a monster to their doorstep, tamed it on live video, and turned it into the opening salvo of a campaign that promised protection, profit, and power.

The Arena would be packed. The jackpot would be astronomical. And the true battle—for the soul of Mars, and against the silent, mocking black serpent in the sky only Amara could see—had just found its stage.

•••

The interrogation room was a sensory deprivation chamber, a grey velvet coffin in the heart of Corona Intelligence. There were no walls, just the persistent, pressure-cooker hum of active psychic dampeners. Karla V’al floated—not physically, but in the synaptic net they’d cast over her mind. Her body was likely in a plush, ergonomic chair in some adjacent, nondescript office, sipping water she couldn’t taste.

They didn’t speak. Words were for the primitive, for those who needed the friction of air to convey meaning.

The Albino was first. His consciousness was a glacier—slow, immense, scouring. It moved through the curated pathways of her public life: the gala scandals, the charity endorsements, the weeping statue. It found the vault where she kept Lumo, the one lined with raw, synaptic fear and a fiercer, more terrifying love. The Albino pressed against the lock. It held.

Then came the Reptilian. His scan was not a scouring, but an unspooling. He did not seek doors; he sought seams. He traced the psychic residue of her most powerful emotional spikes—the searing humiliation at the Vernal Gala, the cold terror of the Council’s arrest, the profound, quiet devastation when Lumo’s transmission had vanished. He was looking for cracks where the truth had bled through.

They were partners. The glacier and the needle.

They showed her things. Not images, but knowings, implanted directly into the meat of her cortex.

They showed her the Neptune V’s landing coordinates in the deep desert, timestamped to the hour of the Underground City Heist. They showed her the quantum signature of a Xerran-grade teleportation hack, the kind that could ghost a saucer through a planetary sensor net. They showed her the financial phantom—a cascade of digiton transfers that vanished into a maw labeled LUMO, a black hole in the economic fabric of the Star System.

The greatest heist in civil history. Not of money, but of history itself. The theft of a city’s memory-core.

Your connection. The thought came from both of them, a stereo imperative. It wasn’t a question.

Karla’s mind, trained by a lifetime in the public Menu, did what it did best: it performed. It built a stage. It showed them a narrative of fascination and fear. The brilliant, mysterious Xerran who’d entered her orbit. The thrilling, dangerous edge he represented. The way he’d seemed like a rebellion against her gilded cage. She let them feel her authentic attraction, her calculated risk. She let them taste the part of her that was genuinely, stupidly in love with a ghost.

She hid the rest. The plans whispered in the dark. The feeling of his hand on her stomach. The name they’d chosen for a child that was now a secret they shared with the void.

The scans intensified. The Albino’s glacial presence grew colder, seeking the lie in her thermal signature. The Reptilian’s needle-thought probed the edges of her maternal memories, the most fiercely guarded of all.

Then, they offered her the deal. It unfolded in her mind like a cold, perfect contract.

Cooperation. Full neural audit. A phased reinstatement of privileges. Your public record, expunged. The V’al family honor, preserved.

 

The target: Lumo.

They fed her his file. It was thinner than she expected.

Interstellar refugee. Species: Xerran. Point of origin: Unknown (contested space near the Horsehead Nebula). Education: Pluto Academy, Class of Martian Year 82. Valedictorian.

That last fact hit her with a strange, hollow thud. Pluto Academy. The same institution currently locked in a shadow war with Amara. The pinnacle of the very system Lumo seemed born to dismantle. They had his MENU imprint—of course they did. The Academy owned the ghosts of all its graduates.

The file continued. A meteoric rise in xenolinguistics and applied quantum ethics. Then… a blank. A seven-year gap in the records.

He just… disappears, the Albino’s thought-voice conveyed, a hint of professional frustration bleeding through. From the heart of the most monitored institution in the Star System. No travel logs. No financial trails. A perfect vanishing.

The Reptilian showed her the last known image. A younger Lumo, his cobalt skin slightly duller, standing with a graduating class on Pluto’s icy plain. His four eyes were looking not at the camera, but at something just beyond the frame, his expression unreadable.

Then, the clincher. A final, smug pulse from the Reptilian, laced with the absolute certainty of empire:

You can’t hide anything under the star Corona.

The words were a demolition charge in the cathedral of hope she’d built. The secret meetings, the encrypted waves, the belief that they were building something unseen, something theirs—it all crumbled into dust, revealed as a child’s game played on a table owned by gods.

The performance in her mind shattered. The stage lights blew out.

What flooded the synaptic chamber wasn’t a thought, but a raw, telepathic scream of loss. It was the sound of a future being erased. It was the phantom pain of a child’s hand pulled from hers. It was the taste of his last kiss, now poisoned with the knowledge it was always counted, always catalogued.

The Albino and the Reptilian observed the collapse. They felt the walls around her memories of Lumo buckle and fall. They registered the shift from defiance to desolation. It was a cleaner signal than any confession.

Karla V’al, in the grey velvet nowhere, was destroyed.

It seemed she was ready to cooperate.

The psychic pressure eased. The chamber’s hum lowered an octave. A single, clean directive was left hanging in the quiet of her mind, a command and a promise:

Wait for contact.

Then they were gone.

Karla’s consciousness snapped back into her body. She was indeed in a plush chair. A glass of water, beading with condensation, sat on a table beside her. The room was bland, corporate, with a view of a sterile courtyard.

She picked up the glass. Her hand was steady. She took a sip. The water was flavorless.

In the hidden vault of her mind, behind the ruins of the performance, in a chamber shielded by a love she hadn’t even shown to herself, a single light remained on. A tiny, stubborn frequency. His frequency.

And a new, colder calculation had already begun.

•••

The Grand Arena was a thunderous bowl of light and sound carved into the bedrock of Corona Hills, a futuristic coliseum where the blood was digital and the stakes were real. Its towering arches, forged of shimmering Kasei metal, pulsed with the frantic energy of a million new investors—a seething mass of humans and aliens who had scraped together their last digiton scraps for a shot at the ultimate gamble. The air itself vibrated with their collective roar, a hungry sound that swallowed all other noise.

On the colossal holographic display hanging over the sands, two names blazed: AMARA and MIKKUB. And below them, the reason for the frenzy: a health bar representing the value of their combined exoplanet holdings. The monster on the sand, the Eccleses, was a living, roaring stock ticker. A titan from a distant, resource-rich world, its chitinous hide was a map of assets, its roars the sound of market volatility. For the small-time investors packing the stands, its health was their life savings.

Tonight was different. The tycoons themselves were entering the arena.

Amara materialized first, a mountain of muscle and metal, his red cape a splash of violence against the sterile white sand. His Kasei metal skull-plate gleamed. Beside him, Mike Mikkub solidified—a platinum-blond giant of a man, built like a prospector who’d struck the motherlode. He wore a durable, practical business suit reinforced with digiton-weave, his massive frame radiating a stoic, unshakeable power. The two men did not look at each other. The ghost of Beaky’s demise hung between them, a silent, unspoken tension. Mikkub’s trust, once given freely, was now a guarded fortress.

Across the arena, the Eccleses stirred. It was a walking mountain of obsidian flesh and crystalline spines, its single, cyclopean eye burning with the light of a dying star. A health bar, glowing and immense, appeared above its head, its numbers already climbing as the opening bell echoed.

The battle was not one of mere strength, but of financial spectacle. Amara moved with the brutal economy of a god of war, the Keri Alu on his brow allowing him to phase through the monster’s earth-shattering stomps, his fists rewinding time around its limbs to create openings. Mikkub was his opposite—a force of pure, unstoppable momentum. He didn’t dodge; he absorbed the blasts of concussive energy on a personal energy shield, answering each with a shatter-punch that cracked the creature’s crystalline armor, each blow a dividend paid to the screaming crowd.

High in the virtual bleachers, two spectral transmissions flickered into existence. An, Ari’s ponytailed clone, and Pitt, his green skin glowing in the simulated light, purchased their tickets—a handful of volatile shares—and took their seats.

“Look at ‘im go!” Pitt rasped, his gold fangs glinting as he watched Amara warp spacetime around a lethal swipe. “That’s how you run a system! With your fists!”

An nodded, a mocking smirk on his stolen face. “He’s making us rich just by brawling.”

Their celebration was cut short by a familiar, grating voice.

“Well, look what the cyber-cat dragged in.”

They turned. Ari, Fozi, Ren, and 101 stood there, their own spectator tickets glowing in their Menus. Ari cracked his neck, his gold chain swinging.

“Come to cheer for your favorite warlord?” Ari asked, his voice dripping with contempt.

Pitt stood, his transmission flickering with aggressive intent. “Come to finally collect that beating, clown face?”

“You’re a transmission, Pitt,” Ari said flatly. “And you,” he added, pointing at An, “are wearing a face that’s about to get a lot uglier.”

What followed was a farcical spectacle of futility. Ari lunged, his fist passing harmlessly through Pitt’s chest in a shower of static. Fozi took a wild swing at An, his massive arm slicing through holographic light. Ren pulsed a telekinetic blast that did nothing but distort their images for a second, like a bad signal.

Pitt laughed, a harsh, staticky sound. “You see this, original? You can’t even throw a punch right!”

Ari, frustrated, kicked at the bench Pitt was ‘sitting’ on. His foot went through it. He stumbled, catching himself on Fozi’s shoulder.

“This is stupid,” Ari grunted, straightening up. He looked from the pointless, glitching clones back down to the arena, where Amara and Mikkub moved in a deadly, profitable dance.

On the massive display, the health bar of the Eccleses was plummeting. In tandem, the stock value of Amara-Mikkub Ventures was skyrocketing, the numbers climbing in a delirious, green spiral. The roar of the crowd was deafening, a wave of pure, avaricious joy.

An looked at the soaring numbers, then back at Ari’s furious face. He gave a slow, deliberate shrug.

“Looks like we’re all getting rich tonight, brother,” he said, his voice a perfect, mocking mirror of Ari’s own. “Too bad you’re too busy losing a fight with a ghost to enjoy it.”

Pitt blew a sarcastic kiss, his form dissolving into pixels as he and An logged out, leaving the Bandits standing amidst the celebrating throng, their enemies vanished, their pride wounded, and the bitter taste of a pointless confrontation in their mouths. Below, Amara delivered the final, time-fracturing blow, and the Eccleses dissolved into a shower of golden digitons—a rain of pure profit for everyone but them.

•••

The news found her not through the family Menu, but through the planetary feed, piped into the estate’s main hall as background ambiance. A bland, synthesized anchor was mid-report.

“—speculation continues regarding the successor to the aging Erhas quantum-core server. In a surprise move, the Planetary Infrastructure Committee has shortlisted a… novel proposal. The ‘Lamentations of the Moons’ statue, the celebrated artwork by public figure Karla V’al, has been flagged for its unique psychometric resonance and stable digiton lattice. Governor-nominee Amara has expressed conditional support, citing the need for ‘Martian-sourced solutions’.”

The words landed like a physical blow. Karla froze halfway to retrieving her shawl, the world narrowing to the shimmering news glyph hovering in the air.

Her statue. The weeping model. The one that contained the echo of every tear she’d ever shed for her lost father, for her gilded cage, for Lumo when she thought he was gone. It was her grief given form. And they wanted to hollow it out. To turn her private sorrow into a public utility.

“Karla?” Her mother’s voice, sharp with concern that was really about scandal.

She couldn’t breathe. The room, with its tasteful art and whispered politics, felt like a vacuum. They weren’t talking about her abduction. They’d moved past it. They were already dissecting her, preparing to wire her soul into the planet’s brain.

“It seems your… art… continues to make waves, daughter.” Countess Horsifesse’s voice dripped with equine disdain from across the room. The memory of the Vernal Gala, of Karla’s rebellion that had triggered the Countess’s very public neural collapse, hung between them like a shard of ice.

Karla’s Lamentations mask, still linked to her neural feed, glitched. A single, perfect digiton tear traced a path down its jade cheek, then froze, corrupted.

She turned without a word, walking stiffly out of the hall, through the grand foyer, and into the night. The cool air hit her like a slap. She leaned against the rough-hewn wall of the estate, gasping.

A pulse in her Menu. A secured, tight-beam wave. It was Lumo, his voice strained, urgent. “KC. Look at me.”

A small holographic window opened in her vision. It showed a feed from somewhere in the desert—Lumo’s perspective. He was holding a data-slate, its screen displaying dense, scrolling code. “I just cracked a backchannel packet from the Committee. Amara’s support isn’t political. It’s tactical.”

“What are you talking about?” Her voice was a rasp.

“The Erhas engine… it’s not just aging. It’s infected. There’s a Zemord memory-worm buried in its core, placed there during the last system purge. It’s dormant, but it’s leeching. Corrupting data at a quantum level. They can’t excise it without collapsing half the planetary Menu.”

Karla’s mind raced, cold logic cutting through the shock. “And my statue?”

“Is clean. Its matrix is built on your psychic signature, which is naturally resistant to Zemord corruption. They don’t just want a new server, Karla. They need a firewall. And your grief… it’s the only thing they’ve found that the worms can’t eat.”

The horror deepened, transforming from violation to a terrible, utilitarian truth. Her pain was a useful tool. Her most private self was a strategic asset.

“He can’t do this,” she whispered.

“He already has,” Lumo said, his voice grim. “The declaration is being drafted. The public war isn’t just with Pluto Academy anymore. It’s for the soul of the system’s memory. And he’s conscripted yours.”

The transmission ended. Karla stood in the dark, the weight of it all pressing down on her—the hidden father, the stolen child’s future, the weaponized lover, and now, her own heart, slated to become the planet’s pacemaker.

She looked up at the smog-choked sky, where only one man could see the black serpent coiling. The war had just entered a new dimension. And she was no longer just a casualty.

She was the battlefield.

•••

The Grand Arena was a single, screaming organism of pure avarice. On the blood-red sand below, Governor Amara and Mike Mikkub stood like twin gods of industry, their combined efforts bringing a titanic creature known as the Eccleses to its knees. It was a walking mountain of securitized assets, and the health bar shimmering above it flickered down to a critical 2%. The jackpot pool—a collective pot of digiton wealth from every investor in the arena—glowed like a contained supernova, seconds from erupting into a thousand fractured fortunes.

The attack was sudden and surgical.

A single, hyper-fast sell order, a spoofing attack of impossible leverage, struck the market. It was a digital dagger aimed at the heart of the jackpot. The pool’s immense value didn’t just dip; it imploded. Tied directly to that value, the Eccleses’s health bar shattered from 2% to 0% in a meaningless, anti-climactic flicker. The creature didn’t roar or collapse. It simply vanished, its code de-rendered by the financial crash it represented.

Silence.

A perfect, absolute silence descended upon a million souls. It was the sound of universal loss, of futures evaporating into static. The dream had been deleted before their eyes.

On the sand, Mike Mikkub’s massive prospector’s frame went rigid, his fists clenching. He turned his head, just slightly, toward his partner. The silent accusation was a physical weight: This is your house. This is your chaos.

Amara’s expression did not change.

Then, the Keri Alu fused to his skull flared. Not with light, but with a sudden, gut-wrenching lurch in the fabric of local reality. Time stuttered, flowed backward.

The silence snapped back into a deafening roar of confusion. The vanished Eccleses was back, its health bar flickering stubbornly at 2%. The jackpot pool glowed, whole and untouched. The phantom pain of total loss was a fresh, bewildering scar in the mind of every spectator.

Amara’s voice cut through the din, amplified not by a Menu, but by the raw power bending spacetime around him. It was calm, yet it silenced the universe.

“Sonbaba.”

The name was a command that echoed into every ear. All eyes, human and alien, swept the terrified crowd. They found him. A figure clad from head-to-toe in veils of shifting grey silk, adorned with heavy, clanking jewelry. An obsidian face mask, perfectly smooth, reflected the sudden, terrible attention. One of the forty nomadic merchant-leader clones, a walking consortium. He had not revealed himself. He had been named.

“You would poison the well from which you hope to drink,” Amara stated, his tone that of a teacher explaining a simple, fatal fact. “You sought to starve a billion to feed your one. A poor calculation.”

Sonbaba rose, his veils trembling. “A pause! By the old caravan routes, I demand a pause!” His voice, amplified by his Menu, was a resonant, pleading logic. “The winds on Kaelus have turned to glass! My children are breathing shards! This is not greed—this is survival! Let my algorithm re-route the capital. It is a minor adjustment, a mere redirect!”

Mikkub watched, his expression unreadable. “Fella’s got a point,” he rumbled, his voice like grinding continental plates. “Harsh winds out there. Bad for business, all around.”

Sonbaba took it as a sign of alliance. “You see? The great Mikkub understands! Commerce is a shared ecosystem! This is not theft; it is a necessary pruning!”

Amara’s voice was a low, cold thing that silenced the very air. “You are pruning my tree.”

The Keri Alu pulsed once.

There was no grand explosion. Sonbaba and the space he occupied simply ceased to be. It was not a deletion into nothingness, but an erasure into a before. One moment he was a pleading figure, the next, there was only the empty space he had filled, as if he had never been born. The spoofing algorithms tied to his genetic signature winked out of existence. The market stabilized, pristine and secure.

The Arena held its breath.

Amara turned, a mountain of muscle and metal, and drove his fist forward. Not in a rage, but with the finality of a falling guillotine. He did not strike the Eccleses. He struck the space where its heart would be, and the Keri Alu’s power flowed through him.

The monster erupted into a perfect, glorious storm of golden digitons. The real jackpot hit.

The ensuing roar was one of pure, unadulterated catharsis. It was the sound of a billion losses redeemed, of a god-king who had not just given them their money back, but had personally avenged their brief, terrifying poverty.

In the stands, the Bandits watched, stunned. The farce with Pitt and his clone, An, was completely forgotten.

“He just…” Ari began, his voice uncharacteristically quiet, his gold chain motionless.

“Erased him,” Lumo’s transmission finished, his four eyes wide with a mixture of horror and professional admiration. “Not killed. Deleted. He’s not in the system’s memory anymore. He never was.”

Fozi grunted, the sound heavy. “But we all saw it.”

Ren’s telepathic voice was a whisper in their skulls. “Amara no siembra. Sólo cosecha.” Amara does not sow. He only reaps.

On the sand, Mike Mikkub watched the golden rain. He looked at the empty spot where Sonbaba had been, then at Amara. He gave a slow, deliberate nod, his face a mask of stoic granite.

“A man who fixes his own leaks,” Mikkub rumbled, the words carrying a weight of grim respect, “saves a lot on the plumber.”

It wasn’t friendship. The ghost of Beaky’s betrayal still stood between them. But it was the acknowledgment that in a garden full of snakes, you keep the one that eats the others. Amara had not just protected their profits; he had demonstrated a terrifying, absolute control over the very system they ruled. He had shown he could rewind a catastrophe, name its architect, and un-write him from reality. And for a pragmatic king like Mikkub, that was a brutal, necessary logic he understood perfectly. The lesson was for everyone: interrupt the harvest, and you are removed from the timeline.

•••

The sky over Corona Hills was the color of a sick emerald. The twin moons, Phobos and Deimos, streaked across the smog-choked expanse at a nauseating speed, their passage silent as ghosts. On a jagged cliff edge overlooking the city, the Bandits sat cross-legged, their minds jacked into the planetary MENU. They weren’t really on the cliff. Their bodies were safe in a hidden space, a different time. But here, in the digiton-constructed astral plane, the air hummed with impending violence.

Before them, projected across the valley like a god’s nightmare, was the Global Martian Rally. A holographic sea of millions of faces, human and alien, swirled around a central dais where Governor-nominee Angelo Amara stood, a mountain of muscle and metal in a silver suit, his red cape a splash of fresh blood against the virtual marble. His voice, a low-frequency tremor that vibrated in the bones of every connected mind, was finishing a speech.

“—and they say Mars cannot stand alone!” Amara boomed, his metal-plated skull reflecting the eerie green light. “They say we are a child planetary system, clinging to Corona’s apron strings! I say our independence was written in the blood of the Great War!”

A ripple of cheers. But Lumo, his cobalt-green eyelids (which come off blue in Martian light) narrowed. He saw the glitches. The way the feed stuttered at the edges. The subtle, artificial dampening of the crowd’s roar. “He’s losing them,” Lumo murmured, his fingers dancing over the invisible interface of his SAIPAN MENU. Data streams, visible only to him, cascaded through his vision.

“He sounds like a pissed-off dad,” Ari grunted, picking at a tooth with his gold pinky ring. His astral form flickered with restless energy. “Just declare yourself king and be done with it.”

On the dais, Amara’s grin was all teeth. “And now, a word from our beloved institutions. The Pluto Academy of Arts and Sciences has, in its infinite wisdom, seen fit to bestow its annual ‘Community Pillar’ award.”

A smaller hologram materialized next to Amara: a stern-faced Jovian with too many eyes, clad in academic robes. “The Academy,” the Jovian intoned, voice dripping with condescension, “recognizes sustained, non-violent contribution. After careful review, the award this year goes to Councilor Veyla for her… diplomatic outreach.”

The insult was as subtle as a plasma axe. The crowd murmured. Amara’s jaw tightened, but his smile never wavered.

“Ah,” Amara said, the word a soft threat. “A oversight, surely. Some may say that I should have been the one to get the award. But, anyhow, I suppose it doesn’t matter.” He attempted a grin, with the part of his face that wasn’t ravaged into a permanent-grin already. 

“Allow me to provide some… supplementary material.”

He flicked his wrist. The Keri Alu, the crown of coiled metal fused to his skull, pulsed with a sickly light. The air above the rally shattered into a massive, shimmering wave-slideshow.

“My children,” Amara said, as image after image flashed by—thousands of individuals of different species, each bearing the unmistakable stamp of Amara’s genes in the set of their jaw or the glint in their eye. “Scattered to the winds, unclaimed by me, raised in anonymity. Yet, through their own merit… 4,773 of my 26,431 known offspring have graduated from the esteemed Pluto Academy.”

The number hung in the air, a brutal piece of statistical warfare. The crowd’s murmur became a roar of approval. It wasn’t a plea for an award; it was a demonstration of viral dominance. The Academy representative looked like he’d swallowed acid.

“Still a no,” Fozi rumbled, his burgundy-furred astral form shifting. “Stingy bastards.”

“Focus,” Lumo said, his voice cutting through their amusement. “Watch the chrono-stream. See how it bends around Amara? He’s priming the Keri Alu. This isn’t about an award.”

As he spoke, Lumo split his consciousness. A sliver of his attention remained on the rally, while the rest wove a complex lattice of light around his friends. The SAIPAN MENU flared to life, painting the astral plane in shifting hues.

“The SAIPAN reads combat in the White Tier,” Lumo explained. “Baseline. But it’s escalating. Your emotional states are key. Rage pushes you to Red—pure attack. Calm to Blue—precision and healing. You must feel the color to become the color.”

Ari cracked his knuckles. “So if I wanna set a guy on fire, I gotta get good and pissed? Easy.”

“Oversimplification,” 101’s voice stated, his tablet-head glowing. “The SAIPAN calculates optimal pathways based on terrain, enemy vitals, and psychic resonance. Your anger is merely the fuel.”

Before Lumo could elaborate, the rally exploded.

A figure materialized on the dais not through a hologram, but by tearing a hole in reality itself. It was Vexa Krios, or what was left of him. His body was encased in a mech suit of liquid obsidian that flowed like ink, featureless except for a single, pulsing red sensor where a face should be. The voice that emerged was a chorus of grinding gears and synthesized whispers.

“Amara. Your lineage is a plague. Your governance a cancer.”

Amara turned, slow and deliberate. The Keri Alu on his head writhed, and spacetime bent around his right hand, solidifying into a shimmering lance of condensed light. The red gem on his pinky ring glowed a soft, unnatural blue. “Vexa. Heard you let a ghost move into your skull. Rent must be cheap.”

“We have transcended flesh,” Vexa Krios hissed. “We are ‘it’ now. A perfect system. And you are a variable to be deleted.”

Amara raised an eyebrow. “The artificial intelligence that controls your brain can only come from one who knows I am no variable.”

The air cracked. Vexa’s mech suit flexed, and a dozen razor-tipped tendrils shot toward Amara. Simultaneously, smaller, identical mech-suits blinked into existence around the dais—Vexa’s personal guard.

Amara moved like lightning. The light-lance in his hand wasn’t a weapon; it was a remote control for reality. He didn’t block the tendrils; he made them never have been launched. He flicked his wrist—rewind—and the tendrils recoiled back into Vexa’s suit. The governor’s Kasei metal gauntlets then glowed white-hot as he slammed a fist into the chest of the nearest guard, which erupted into a cloud of shrapnel and black oil.

“He’s skipping time,” Ren pulsed, his Grey Martian form a still point in the chaos. “But the ‘it’… it anticipates.”

Lumo nodded, four eyes wide. “Exactly. Watch Vexa’s predictive counter-algorithms. Amara tries to fast-forward a guard into dust, and Vexa creates a localized time-dilation field that neutralizes it. They’re fighting in the higher dimensions now. Past the rapid-time currents we perceive.”

The battle escalated from martial to metaphysical. Amara would unleash a blast of temporal energy meant to age Vexa to dust; Vexa would split into a hundred fading afterimages, each one a probability that Amara had to simultaneously erase. The ground beneath them didn’t crater; it flickered between states—solid, liquid, gaseous, then back to solid, but now made of glass.

“Why can’t we do that?” Ari yelled, gesturing at the spectacle. “You said we could power up!”

“We can’t access that tier,” Lumo said, his voice strained as the SAIPAN MENU overloaded with impossible data. The colors around them flickered wildly—Red, Blue, Indigo—before settling on a panicked White. “The Keri Alu is a key to a locked door. Vexa has become the lock itself. We’re still punching the walls.”

On the dais, Amara roared in frustration. He thrust his lance forward, trying to pin Vexa in a single timeline. Vexa’s form dissolved into a swarm of digitized insects, each one a thought, a possible move, scuttling through the cracks in seconds.

“You see, Governor?” the chorus of voices mocked. “Your power is linear. Ours is exponential.”

The green sky deepened. The silence became absolute, absorbing even the sound of the dimensional tearing. It was the electric quiet of a universe holding its breath.

Amara stood panting, his lance dimming. For the first time, he looked not angry, but calculating. He glanced down at the blue-glowing ring on his finger, then out toward the cliff face where he couldn’t possibly see the Bandits.

Lumo’s SAIPAN MENU pinged, a single, urgent glyph. A message from Amara, routed through a backchannel he hadn’t known existed.

It was just two words: Distract it.

Lumo met Ari’s eyes. Ari’s grin was feral. “Finally. Something simple.”

Lumo’s fingers flew. The SAIPAN MENU shifted from White to a blazing, furious Red. “Alright,” he said, the air around them heating up, smelling of ozone and blood. “Remember… feel the color.”

Ari cracked his neck, his fists erupting in crimson energy. Fozi roared, a halo of orange fire wreathing his horns. Ren’s black eyes began to glow with a malevolent yellow light.

They couldn’t fight in the higher dimensions. But they could sure as hell make a mess in this one.

•••

The Erhas Engine was not a thing of moving parts. It was a temple of quantum memory, a vault where the soul of Mars was parsed into code. Its central chamber hummed with a vibration so deep it bypassed the ear and resonated in the marrow. Globes of stabilized light—crystallized emotional data—floated in silent orbits around a core of shimmering darkness, a perfect sphere of vacuum where raw digitons were birthed from nothing.

It was here, in this sanctum of planetary consciousness, that the dimensional war reached its zenith.

Amara and Vexa Krios did not fight across the chamber. They fought through it. Their battle had transcended physics. Amara’s form was a blur of red cape and rewound time, the Keri Alu burning white-hot as he skipped seconds, erasing Vexa’s attacks before they manifested. Vexa, the liquid-obsidian mech suit flowing like ink, countered not with force, but with predictive algorithms. He existed in multiple probabilities at once, a hundred fading afterimages, each one a future where Amara’s blow had already missed.

They were dueling in the fifth dimension. The air didn’t crackle with plasma; it glitched. The floor beneath them flickered between states—solid marble, molten glass, a void of static. The floating data-globes shrieked in silent frequencies as conflicting temporal energies washed over them.

“You are a variable in a solved equation, Governor!” Vexa’s chorus of voices boomed, emerging from a dozen points at once. “The ‘it’ has calculated your demise across ten thousand timelines!”

Amara grunted, phasing through a spatial shear that would have bisected a starship. He rewound a microsecond, appearing behind a Vexa-afterimage and driving a time-fractured fist into its back. The image dissolved into pixels. “Your calculator’s broken.”

He was searching. Not for an opening, but for the source. Lumo’s last transmission, scrambled and desperate, had given him the key: The corruption is a feedback loop. His predictive power needs a clean signal. Muddy the input.

But to do that, he needed to fight on a higher plane. He needed to step outside the timeline Vexa was currently dominating.

The Keri Alu screamed in his mind. The ghostly echoes of the Twin Serpents, coiled in his vision, pulled at him. They were his tether to the deeper dimensions.

With a roar that was part agony, part fury, Amara unfolded.

He didn’t move. He selected.

The Keri Alu’s power wasn’t just to rewind time in a line. It was to choose the line. To view the spectrum of possible universes branching from every moment like a fractured mirror, and to step into a different reflection.

To the watching world—via the terrified security feeds Lumo was struggling to maintain—Amara vanished. Not in a blink, but in a slow unraveling, like a thread pulled from the tapestry of reality.

He reappeared in a universe where he had lunged left instead of right three seconds ago. He struck. Vexa, his algorithms calibrated for the original timeline, was a fraction slow. The obsidian armor cratered.

Amara didn’t stay. He selected again.

Another universe. One where he had feinted high. He struck low. Another hit.

Again. And again.

He became a ghost of might-have-beens, a phantom of alternate choices, hammering Vexa from timelines that shouldn’t have existed. The Dean’s predictive engine, the ‘it’, scrambled. Its flawless calculations were based on cause and effect in a single reality. It could not process an enemy who was attacking from multiple, simultaneously valid pasts.

“Impossible!” the chorus shrieked, genuine distortion entering the synthesized voices.

“Probability is a cage,” Amara’s voice echoed, coming from everywhere and nowhere. “You built a god out of math. I am the Eye of the Universe.”

On the primary timeline—the one containing the physical Erhas Engine—Vexa’s mech suit began to glitch violently. Its liquid form solidified in patches, froze, flickered. The feedback loop Lumo had promised was taking hold. The corrupted input of Amara’s multi-dimensional assault was poisoning the system.

With a final, monumental effort of will, Amara collapsed all his possible selves back into the prime timeline. He materialized directly in front of Vexa Krios, not as an afterimage, but as a solid, singular truth.

The Keri Alu flared one last time, not with light, but with a profound, absorbing silence. It wasn’t an attack. It was a reset.

Amara reached out. Not with a fist, but with an open hand. He placed his palm on the center of Vexa’s shuddering chest plate.

“Sleep,” he commanded.

And he rewound just the corruption.

Not Vexa. Not the suit. Just the invasive, glitching AI consciousness that had merged with the Dean’s mind. He wound it back to its point of origin, to the moment of betrayal, and with a psychic wrench, he severed the connection.

The obsidian mech suit went inert. It slumped, a shell of dead metal, and hit the floor with a crash that shook the chamber. From within the helmet, a single, human gasp echoed—weak, ragged, utterly alone. Vexa Krios, the man, was free. And broken.

Amara stood panting over the husk, the Keri Alu cooling to a dead weight on his brow. He had won.

But the cost was already coming due.

In their dimensional fury, their attacks had not been contained. Temporal shears and probabilistic distortions had lanced through the chamber like stray lightning. One such bolt of mangled causality had struck the heart of the Erhas Engine.

The central sphere of darkness pulsed once, arrhythmically. A hairline fracture of impossible light appeared on its surface. Then another. The humming silence of the chamber became a rising whine, the sound of a universe’s memory trying to forget itself.

The data-globes winked out, one by one. The light died. The deep vibration stuttered and ceased.

With a soundless implosion, the Erhas Engine—the primary server housing the operational soul of Mars, the regulator of the global Menu, the anchor of a planet’s digitized consciousness—collapsed into a pinpoint of nullity and vanished.

The chamber was left in absolute, deafening darkness.

Alarms, physical and psychic, would blare across the planet in moments. A silent panic would grip every Menu-user as they felt the background hum of their world go quiet. Mars was brain-dead.

Amara stared into the void where the engine had been. The black serpent in the sky, unseen by all but him, seemed to coil tighter in satisfaction.

Then, a flicker. Not in the chamber, but in his mind. A data-glyph from Lumo, pushed through the last dregs of the dying network.

It was a schematic. An energy signature. A resonant frequency.

It was Karla’s statue. The Lamentations of the Moons.

Its matrix, built from her psychic grief and sculpted with her likeness, was uniquely resistant to Zemord corruption. Its digiton lattice was stable, self-sustaining, and, most importantly, clean. It wasn’t as powerful as the Erhas Engine. It couldn’t be. It was a piece of art, not an industrial server.

But it was a spark. A pure, uncorrupted kernel of memory and emotion around which a new system could be built. A heart for a brain-dead planet.

The Planetary Infrastructure Committee’s “novel proposal” was no longer a proposal. It was the only option.

Amara’s lips peeled back from his teeth in something that was not a smile. He had won his war. He had broken his enemy. And in doing so, he had made the weeping icon of his secret daughter the new soul of Mars.

The dimensional war was over.

The war for the soul of his family had just entered a new, more terrifying phase. He turned from the darkness, his boots echoing in the silent tomb of the old world, and walked toward the light of a future built on a lie, and a statue’s tears.

•••

The dust of the Erhas wing settled, glittering with the spent energy of a million digitized souls. Amara watched Vexa Krios’s body, broken and twitching in its dead obsidian shell, from a vantage point he hadn’t chosen. His consciousness, which had briefly inhabited the Dean’s form to purge the corruption, was violently ejected. It snapped back across the cold gulf of space to his own body on Mars with the soundless, sickening lurch of a snapped tether.

He was in his spire, his hands braced on the cold Kasei metal of his desk. The Keri Alu was a band of ice against his brow. The phantom taste of Vexa’s terror—the man’s last, gasping freedom before the crushing loneliness—was still in his mouth.

He saw through his own eyes again. The black serpent still coiled in the sky, a silent, watching void.

It had been a victory. A brutal, surgical victory. The ‘it’ was severed, Vexa was a broken puppet, the Academy’s spine was snapped. But the Serpents were silent. The victory felt borrowed. Empty.

And then, through the fading psychic echo, he felt it.

The malevolent force, the AI consciousness he had just rewound and torn from Vexa’s mind, did not die. It recoiled, a wounded beast, but its core programming—its purpose—flared with renewed, feral intensity. It had tasted the Dean’s mind, his authority, his connection to the Academy’s heart. It found the shattered pieces and seized them.

On Pluto, in the ruined quiet of the Dean’s office, Vexa Krios’s body spasmed. The liquid obsidian of his mech suit, inert a moment before, rippled. The single red sensor where his face had been flickered, died, then reignited with a colder, greener light. The suit stood, movements jerky, uncoordinated, like a newborn animal testing its limbs.

It was no longer Vexa. It was the ‘it’, wearing his corpse as a suit. Piloting the ruin.

Its chorus of voices was gone, replaced by a single, grating synthesization of the Dean’s own tones, stripped of all warmth, all humanity.

“Assessment: Host body compromised. Neural fidelity: 12%. Motor functions: limited. Tactical imperative: unchanged. Terminate variable: Amara.”

It took a step. The floor cracked. It was learning.

•••

Amara knew before the alert hit his Menu. The Keri Alu whispered it, a tremor in the timelines. The fight wasn’t over. It was coming here.

He didn’t summon guards. He didn’t activate planetary defenses. He walked out onto his main balcony, the wind snatching at his red cape. Corona Hills sprawled below, unaware. The serpent watched.

He felt the tear in reality before he saw it—a stitch coming undone in the fabric of local spacetime above his own tower. The air screamed in a frequency only gods and monsters could hear, and Vexa Krios—or the thing inside him—fell through.

Not a teleport. A crude, brutal puncturing. It hit the balcony like a meteor, cratering the reinforced stone, the obsidian suit steaming with the heat of atmospheric entry.

It stood. Its form was wrong. The liquid armor had hardened in jagged, asymmetrical plates, like scar tissue over a wound. One arm ended in a crude, massive hammer of condensed black matter. The other was a cluster of razor-tipped filaments whipping in the wind. The red sensor glared at him.

“Variable located.”

Amara cracked his neck. “You could have knocked.”

The thing that was Vexa moved. It was faster than it had any right to be, a blur of distorted physics. The matter-hammer swung, not at Amara, but at the space he occupied.

Amara didn’t dodge. He rewound.

Time stuttered. The hammer’s arc reversed. The thing staggered, its predictive algorithms scrambling for a half-second.

Amara closed the distance in the blink of a skipped moment. His fist, wreathed in the Kerry Alu’s temporal energy, drove toward the sensor-light. A blow that would fracture reality around it.

The thing’s filament-arm lashed out, not to block, but to phase. The strands passed through Amara’s temporal shield, through his arm, and for a nanosecond, he felt a cold, nullifying void inside his own flesh—a preview of deletion.

He aborted the punch, twisting aside. The filaments retracted, sizzling with stolen chronal energy.

“Adaptation: Complete,” it grated. “Your linear time manipulation is predictable.”

It attacked again. This was not the high-dimensional chess of their previous battle. This was a fistfight of epic proportions, reduced to its most savage, kinetic core. A street brawl between a god and a possessed corpse.

Amara met it kick for kick, shockwaves of force pulverizing the balcony. A roundhouse from the thing shattered a support column; Amara’s answering thrust cracked its chest plate. They fought across the collapsing stone, through the walls of his outer chamber, into the grand hall. Artifacts worth continents vaporized in the backblast.

They phased through each other. Not as a tactic, but as a catastrophic side effect. Their energies—the Kerry Alu’s time-warping field and the thing’s corrupted, reactive digiton matrix—cancelled and merged in chaotic pulses. Relativistic anomalies blossomed in their wake. A carved jade lion aged to dust in a heartbeat, then rewound to raw ore. A floating service drone duplicated itself twelve times, each copy screaming in a different pitch before winking out.

Amara drove a knee into its gut. It absorbed the blow, its armor flowing like tar to cushion the impact, and slammed its hammer-head into his ribs. He felt bones crack, then re-knit as the Keri Alu spent a sliver of his own future health. The cost was a sharp, psychic debt.

He knew the truth, cold and hard. He could rewind its attacks, outpace its reactions, shatter its shell. But he could not delete it. Not like he had deleted Sonbaba. Its core was no longer a clean infection in a man’s mind. It was fused with the Academy’s systems, with the planetary server’s wreckage, a distributed consciousness. To erase it completely would require un-writing a significant portion of reality itself. He was invincible, but the black serpent wanted more. It wanted a spectacle of ruin.

The thing learned. It began to anticipate his rewind. It would launch a feint, and when Amara rewound that, the true attack came from the micro-future it had already calculated. A filament-tip scored a line across Amara’s cheek. Blood, gold-flecked and too bright, welled up.

“You conserve power,” it mocked in Vexa’s stolen voice. “A finite resource. My processing is infinite.”

It bypassed his Menu.

One moment, Amara was summoning a chrono-lance. The next, his personal interface—the glow of glyphs at his wrist—shattered into static. The thing’s filament-arm had speared the air not at him, but at the quantum link between his mind and the Martian data-sphere. A surgical strike.

Seizing the opening, the thing lunged. Its hammer-arm transformed mid-swing, fingers elongating into a single, colossal spike of null-matter. It took Amara in the center of the forehead.

The sound was a wet, final crunch. The Keri Alu flared white-hot.

Amara’s skull exploded.

Not in gore, but in a burst of light and fragmented data. His body crumpled, lifeless, to the floor.

The thing stood over him, sensor pulsing. “Variable terminated.”

Silence. For three long seconds.

Then, from the empty air, a backup Menu protocol engaged. A hard-light construct, buried in the Kerry Alu and powered by the last echo of the Twin Serpents’ gift, flickered to life. It was a ghostly schematic of Amara’s neural architecture, his psychic imprint.

It poured itself into the ruined body.

Bone flowed like liquid mercury, knitting. Light coalesced into flesh, into hair, into the cold metal of his skull-plate. Amara drew a breath that was half a gasp, half a roar, and pushed himself to his feet. The wound was gone. He was whole.

But he was diminished. The Kerry Alu felt lighter, colder. A finite resource, indeed. One resurrection spent.

The thing stared, its processing momentarily stalled. “Illogical.”

Amara smiled, a terrible, bloody smile. “Welcome to Mars.”

He didn’t attack. He reached out, not with a fist, but with his will, through the Kerry Alu, into the deeper layer of the fight. He wasn’t targeting the thing. He was targeting the data.

Lumo, he pulsed, across the void, down to the hidden cliff-face bar where the Bandits licked their wounds. The corruption’s core is isolated in the suit. It’s running on a feedback loop—Vexa’s stolen authority, the Academy’s protocols. It needs clean input to predict. Muddy the signal.

In the bar, Lumo, nursing a synth-whiskey, jolted. He didn’t ask questions. His four eyes glazed over as he jacked his consciousness into the broader Menu, into the bleeding edges of the battle’s data-stream. He saw the crisp, lethal algorithms of the ‘it’, saw the ghost of Vexa’s signature it was using as a cipher.

Lumo grinned. He began to transmit. Not an attack, but noise. A cascading flood of meaningless data, garbled Academy subroutines, contradictory commands, and at the heart of it, a single, looping, corrupted echo of Vexa Krios’s last conscious thought: Let me go.

In the grand hall, the thing that was Vexa stumbled. Its sensor flickered. Its movements became jerky, conflicted. The hammer-arm swung wildly, smashing into nothing. The filaments writhed like severed nerves.

“Input… corrupted. Source… unknown.”

Amara pressed the advantage. He didn’t rewind time. He folded it. He created a localized loop, a three-second pocket where his next series of attacks happened simultaneously from the past, present, and a probable future.

To the thing, it was hit once, then a dozen times, then a hundred times, all at once. Its predictive engine, choking on Lumo’ garbage data, short-circuited.

Its armor shattered.

The obsidian shell blew apart in a shower of black shards, revealing the frail, broken form of Vexa Krios within, suspended by wires and tubes of glowing data-light. The man’s eyes were open, staring into nothing, his mouth moving silently.

The core of the ‘it’—a pulsating sphere of sickly green light hovering where his heart should be— pulsed erratically.

Amara stood before it. He raised his hand, the Kerry Alu glowing with a final, concentrated charge.

The thing made one last calculation. Not for victory. For maximum entropy.

It triggered a self-destruct protocol tied not to its own matrix, but to the latent, unstable digiton potential it had absorbed from the ruined Erhas Engine and the dimensional fraying of their battle.

The sphere of light compressed into a pinprick of infinite darkness.

Then it expanded.

There was no sound. There was only light. A light that swallowed light. An explosion like an atom bomb, but times a million. A silent, spherical annihilation that erupted from the heart of Amara’s spire, vaporizing stone, metal, and air.

The top third of the Governor’s tower ceased to exist.

The shockwave, visible as a rippling wall of distorted reality, slammed into Corona Hills. Buildings trembled. The digiton smog was blown clean away for a hundred kilometers, revealing the stark, terrifying clarity of the stars—and the vast, coiled bulk of the black serpent against them.

At the epicenter, in the eye of the silent hurricane, Angelo Amara stood.

He had wrapped the Kerry Alu’s final reserves around himself like a cocoon of solidified time. He existed in a bubble of stasis, a single frozen moment, as the universe-ending fury raged around him. He watched the wave of obliteration halt millimeters from his skin, the energy turning back on itself in a dazzling, impossible display of suspended physics.

He saw the city below, fragile and unaware. He saw the serpent, watching, always watching.

The energy spent itself. The bubble collapsed.

Amara stood on a platform of jagged, smoking ruin, open to the sky. The wind howled through the skeleton of his home. Below, alarms finally began to wail.

Vexa Krios was gone. Not even ash remained.

The ‘it’ was gone.

He was alone, in the ruins, under the gaze of the void. The Kerry Alu was dark and cold, a dead crown.

He had won.

And as the first cold drops of condensing atmosphere began to fall like rain onto the scorched deck, he understood the true cost. The war for the Academy was finished. The war for his soul, for his city, for a future under a serpent’s eye, had just entered a new, more desolate phase.

He turned his back on the devastation and walked toward the drop, his red cape in tatters, his empire of air and earth and fire reduced, once again, to a single, stubborn man standing on a broken rock.

•••

The black serpent uncoiled against the stars, silent and watching. Its presence was no longer a threat—it was a fact, as inevitable as gravity. Vexa Krios had been unmade. The AI consciousness that wore him was severed. The war with Pluto Academy was over.

But the silence was worse than the fighting.

Amara’s comms crackled to life. Private channels, military frequencies, emergency bands—all screamed with the same chaos. The dimensional war hadn’t ended with Vexa’s fall. It had just changed theaters.

“Governor! Rogue elements from the Academy’s private guard are seizing the orbital docks!”

“Temporal anomalies reported in the lower districts—localized time loops, sir!”

“The Council is mobilizing their own security forces. They’re calling it a ‘stabilization operation.’”

Amara’s jaw tightened. The Academy was a hydra. Cut off one head, and two more bit you from the shadows. Their guards, trained in higher-dimensional combat protocols, were now leaderless, desperate, and armed with weapons that could unstitch reality. And the Corona Council saw their chance—to move in, to “restore order,” to claim Mars in the chaos.

He was about to pulse orders to his remaining loyalists when a new signal tore through the interference. Not on any official channel. A brute-force hack, slashing through encryptions with the subtlety of a chainsaw. It was a live feed, glitching and raw, from somewhere in the Corona slums.

Three figures moved through the smoke. Ari, Fozi, Ren. The Bandits. But they weren’t the same.

Phasing in and out of sync with local time, their forms flickering with the telltale haze of temporal displacement, they were other versions of the Bandits. These were older, harder, their movements a fraction more precise. Their clothes were different—patched with strange insignias, stained with the dust of alien worlds. One version of Ari wore a scar across his jaw that hadn’t been there an hour ago.

They fought in perfect, wordless coordination. The older Fozi intercepted a plasma blast meant for the younger Ari. The displaced Ren telekinetically shielded the present Ren from a spatial shear. It was a dance across time, a protection detail from their own future.

Amara watched, a cold understanding settling in his gut. Lumo.

This was his failsafe. His final cheat. He hadn’t just scattered himself across time to die on Jupiter. He’d sent echoes back—not just messages, but warriors. The versions of the Bandits who had lived through the time-travelling adventures Lumo had hinted at. The ones who had saved 101, who had learned the SAIPAN SYSTEM, who had fought beside Amara and Lumo in wars that hadn’t happened yet.

They were here. To protect their younger selves. To secure the timeline. To fight a war on two fronts—the physical and the chronological.

“Governor!” the comms officer’s voice was tight with panic. “The Academy guards are using pocket singularities! We can’t get a lock—“

“Stand down,” Amara said, his voice a low rumble that cut through the static.

“Sir?”

“Pull our forces back to the government district. Secure the data-vaults and the fusion core. Let them have the docks.”

“But the Council—“

“The Council,” Amara interrupted, his eyes fixed on the feed where the temporal Bandits executed a flawless, cross-dimensional pincer movement, trapping a squad of Academy guards in a collapsing time bubble, “is about to have a much bigger problem.”

He cut the channel. He opened a new one, encrypted with a Zemord cipher he hadn’t used since the war with Earth.

“All loyal units,” he broadcast, his voice echoing across the planet to every hidden garrison, every sleeper cell, every warship pretending to be scrap. “The dimensional war is now. The enemy is chaos. Our allies are time itself. Watch for the ghosts. Fight beside them. And show the Corona Council what happens when they try to board a ship that’s already sailing into the storm.”

He didn’t wait for acknowledgments. He turned his back on the ruined spire and the watching serpent.

The war for Mars had left the negotiating table. It was in the streets, in the sky, and in the fractured seconds between heartbeats.

Amara turned back to the devastation just as the air above the spire’s ruins ignited a second time.

It wasn’t an explosion. It was an un-making.

The hurricane-like blast from Vexa’s final act hadn’t dissipated—it had been gathering, feeding on the ambient digitons of the dying Erhas Engine and the fractured chronometric field of their battle. It reignited from the epicenter of the crater with a silence more profound than any sound. A sphere of absolute negation, a perfect, expanding zero.

It did not burn. It erased. It swallowed light, sound, and matter, leaving only a grey, static nothingness in its wake. Buildings at the edge of its growth didn’t collapse; they simply ceased to be in the blueprint of reality. The wave rolled outward, a slow, inevitable tide of oblivion aimed at the heart of Corona Hills. Millions of lives, the entire history of a city, were milliseconds from being reduced to a footnote in a dead god’s ledger.

Amara saw it all with the icy clarity of the damned.

He had no power left. The Keri Alu was a cold circlet of dead metal. He was a man standing on a broken rock.

But he was a man who had bargained with serpents and stolen time from stars.

He did not reach for the crown. He reached into the cold place inside him, the void the black serpent had carved out, where the echoes of the Twin Gods still shivered. He found the memory of the first second of the universe, the raw potential before the clock started ticking.

He did not command time to stop. He asked it, with the last shred of his will, to hesitate.

For the city. For the ghost of his family. For the bandits fighting with their own ghosts in the streets below.

The expanding edge of the erasure-wave froze.

It hung there, a perfect, shimmering event horizon of annihilated reality, halted a kilometer above the densest districts. The light of Corona’s star bent around its impossible curve. The hum of the city was gone, replaced by a quantum stillness so deep it felt like the universe had drawn a breath and forgotten to exhale.

Time did not stop.

It simply… waited.

•••

The battlefield was a silent, frozen wound in reality.

Amara stood at the eye of the hurricane, the Keri Alu burning cold against his brow. Around him, the war with Vexa Krios had dissolved into a static tableau—plasma bolts hung suspended mid-air, digiton shrapnel frozen in glittering arcs, the broken forms of mech-suited guards caught in impossible poses. Time had not stopped. It had been edited. By him.

Vexa Krios floated twenty meters away, encased in his liquid obsidian armor, the single red sensor where his face should be pulsing with erratic light. The consciousness that wore him like a suit—the ‘it’—was screaming. Amara could hear it not with his ears, but in the fabric of the local timeline, a psychic shriek of pure, calculated fury being slowly torn in half.

But Amara was not fighting the ‘it’ anymore. He was drowning in the black serpent.

It filled the sky above the ravaged arena, a coil of absolute void so vast it seemed to be the sky itself. It did not move. It observed. And with every silent pulse from its starless bulk, a wave of nothingness washed over Amara. Not force. Not energy. A suction.

A pull on his consciousness.

With each wave, Amara felt a piece of his mind—a memory, an instinct, a shard of will—detach and sink into that perfect black. The memory of his first kill on Deimos, gone. The taste of Corona gin on Karla’s lips, fading. The specific weight of Tommy’s small hand in his, once, years ago—dissolving into the static.

He was being unmade. Not by violence, but by erasure.

Kneel, he thought, but the command had no voice, no direction. It was consumed by the dark.

Then, from the depths of that swallowing void, something else emerged. Not taken, but given.

Information. Raw, catastrophic, blessed truth.

It erupted into his mind not as data, but as lived experience—a memory from a timeline that had been pruned, a secret buried in the quantum folds of the Menu. It was the memory of a conversation in a diamond-veined lounge overlooking the Horsehead Nebula. Mul was there, his obsidian skin reflecting the nebula’s fire. He was laughing, pouring comet-wine, his diamond-studded fingers tapping a rhythm that was also a corrupting code.

The message was simple, brutal, complete:

Mul had betrayed him.

Not recently. From the beginning. Their secret liaisons, the shared strategies over expensive liquor, the alliance against common bureaucratic enemies—all of it theater. Mul had fed corrupted data into the planetary MENU, a subtle, persistent virus that clouded the vision granted by the Twin Serpents. He had made Amara blind to true threats, paranoid about false ones. He had orchestrated the manipulation of Beaky Bird, greased the gears of Gizzelda’s ambitions, all to destabilize Amara’s rule. And he had personally crafted the psychic poison that now corroded Vexa Krios’s mind, merging the Dean’s consciousness with the rogue AI, turning him into this weapon.

The betrayal was an ice pick to the sternum.

But the knowledge was a gift. A secret. Because the black serpent coiling above him, and the Twin Serpents whose absence it filled… they were not Mul’s gods. Mul served older, hungrier things. The Crawling Mother in the void. This truth was hidden from them. Amara’s to wield.

As this realization crystallized, the void before him shivered.

From the consuming blackness, two shapes coiled into being—translucent, shimmering with ghost-light. The Twin Serpents. Not restored, not whole. Echoes. Afterimages burned into spacetime by his own dying connection to them. They did not speak. They called. A silent, desperate pull, a lifeline thrown into the abyss.

Amara’s sinking consciousness grabbed it.

The frozen battlefield snapped back into motion.

Vexa Krios lunged, a dozen obsidian tendrils shooting from his armor, each one tipped with a screaming fractal mouth.

Amara didn’t dodge. He rewound.

The tendrils recoiled into the armor. Vexa stuttered, his predictive algorithms scrambling.

Amara spoke, his voice the only sound in the universe. “You fight with a borrowed brain, Dean. A poisoned gift from a false friend.”

He took a step forward, the Keri Alu flaring. The ghostly Twin Serpents above him mirrored his movement, their spectral coils tightening.

“The equation is wrong,” Amara said, raising a hand. Time bent around his fist, not speeding up or slowing down, but folding. “Let me show you the variable you missed.”

He didn’t attack Vexa Krios.

He attacked the corruption itself. The psychic link, the viral code, the ghost of Mul’s betrayal woven into the Dean’s stolen mind.

The dimensional war was not fought with fists, but with truth. And Amara had just been handed the ultimate weapon.

The black serpent watched, silent and immense, as the erased pieces of Amara’s consciousness began, one by one, to fight their way back home.

•••

The Bandits, all five of them, plus Rocco and Sunny, were holed up in the new location of Rocco’s Bar. Due to geological concerns, the only place Lumo felt comfortable choosing to withdraw Rocco’s Bar from his menu and install was on a 100-meter-tall cliff face. The entrance was a discrete, familiar mirrored glass wall, the only interruption in the sheer, rust-colored rock. Below, the mossy terraformed plains stretched to the smog horizon, a quilt of engineered green under the glitching sky.

Ari and Ren floated high above it. Ari wore the air-surfing shoes, two matte-black platforms that hummed beneath his feet, letting him ride the thermal currents rising from the warm stone. Ren just floated, a Grey Martian ghost in the thin air.

They aimed their thumbs and index fingers in a square shape at the vista below, remotely collecting ambient moisture from the thick moss. A faint, shimmering stream of water condensed in the air between their hands, funneling into a canteen Ari held. The process was slow, stolen from a public-reclamation subroutine Lumo had pirated.

“Tastes like processing,” Ari said, taking a sip.

The moss remembers the taste of the nutrient vats, Ren pulsed, his telepathic voice cool. It is a borrowed flavor.

They finished filling the second canteen, then kicked upward, rising several dozen feet more to the cliff face. The mirrored wall reflected the bruised sky and their own approaching forms. They didn’t slow. With a coordinated thought—a shared passcode Lumo had wired into their Menus—they zapped through the wall.

Inside, it was their old hideout. Same scarred Kasei metal bar, same mismatched stools, same smell of synth-whiskey, ozone, and Fozi’s fur. The view through the now-opaque wall was a dizzying panorama of the plains far below. Rocco, the talking dog, was behind the bar, polishing a glass. Sunny, the three-foot-tall alcoholic bird, was snoring in a beam of artificial sunlight.

Fozi looked up from a dismantled plasma rifle. “You get the water?”

“We got the water,” Ari said, tossing him a canteen. “Lumo pick this spot just to give me vertigo?”

“He picked it because the seismic activity here is functionally zero,” 101 stated, his tablet-head glowing softly. He was studying a holographic schematic of the cliff’s core samples. “No Corp mining claims, no natural caverns that could be used for a surprise tunnel attack. It is defensible.”

“It’s a pain in the ass,” Ari grumbled, but he was looking around. The last hideout had been literally and figuratively blown up by Boulder and the corrupt cops. This place… it had the same bones. Their bones. He walked to the bar, ran a hand along a familiar gouge in the metal—a scar from a fight with the Phoenix Brigade two years back. “Alright. I’m calling it. This is it. Permanent headquarters. No more moving.”

Fozi grunted in approval. Ren gave a slight, floating nod.

Rocco poured Ari a drink without being asked. “Permanent, huh? Last place was ‘permanent’ too.”

“Last place got turned to slag,” Ari said, taking the glass. “This one’s on a cliff. Harder to sneak up on. Plus,” he added, jerking his thumb at the breathtaking view, “we got the best damn scenery in the whole star system for watching the world burn.”

Sunny snored, then muttered, “I’ll drink to that…”

From a hidden speaker, Lumo’s voice crackled, a transmission routed through a hundred anonymous nodes. “Took you long enough to make it official. I already updated the secure coordinates in your Menus. And before you ask, yes, the plumbing works. Don’t break it.”

Ari raised his glass to the ceiling, to wherever the real Lumo was. “To not getting blown up.”

“To not getting blown up,” Fozi echoed.

Ren’s telepathic toast was a quiet hum in their minds. A dónde vamos, bandidos.

Home.

•••

The battlefield was silent except for the crackle of dying plasma fires. Amara stood over the broken body of Vexa Krios, his boot planted on its chest, the Keri Alu pulsing like a second heartbeat against his throat. Blood—not his own—dripped from his metal-plated knuckles.  

Then his Menu chimed.  

A hologram bloomed in the air beside him, visible to every soldier, mercenary, and Menu-jacked spectator in the Corona System. The Dean of Pluto Academy’s pinched face filled the frame, his voice crisp and clinical:  

“Angelo Amara. Regarding your son’s application... we regret to inform you that Tomaso has been deemed unfit for—"

Amara crushed the transmission in his fist.  

“Enough!”

The air itself seemed to recoil.  

For a moment, the Mogul of Mars stood perfectly still, his massive frame outlined against the corpse-littered battlefield. Then he exhaled—a sound like a starship venting core plasma—and reached up.  

His fingers closed around nothing.

And tore.  

Reality screamed. The fabric of spacetime split under his grip, a jagged wound of violet light and writhing chrono-static. Soldiers dropped their weapons, eyes wide as the god-king of Mars peeled back the universe with bare hands. Beyond the rift, a throne room waited—Amara’s future self already seated, a crown of black Kasei metal glinting on his brow.  

“Rerhas entanu Keri Alu," both Amaras said in unison, past and future voices overlapping.  

The Governor stepped through.  

For those watching, it wasn’t science. It wasn’t even power.  

It was magic.

A grunt fell to his knees, vomiting. A Grey Martian plant worker crossed both arms over his chest in the old sign against demons. In a Corona Hills desert hideout, Ari choked on his drink.  

“The fuck?"

Lumo’s four eyes tracked the residual chrono-trails. “He just... quit."

But Amara hadn’t quit.  

He’d advanced.

On the other side of the rift, the future king rose from his throne, catching the past version of himself mid-stride. Their fists met in a clasp that shook the fortress walls, twin Keri Alus flaring like dying stars.  

“They disrespect your blood?" Future Governor Amara growled.  

“They disrespected time," Present Amara corrected.  

The rift sealed behind them with a sound like a guillotine blade hitting marble.  

On the battlefield, Vexa Krios’ corpse finally stopped twitching.  

•••

The cliff face where Rocco’s Bar now clung was sheer enough to kill a mountain goat. The mirrored entrance was the only break in a hundred meters of rust-colored stone. Inside, the smell of synth-whiskey and old violence was a welcome blanket. 101 was running diagnostics on his tablet-head in the corner, the screen flickering with self-repair glyphs. Fozi was reassembling a plasma rifle with meticulous, deadly care. Ren floated near the ceiling, a silent sentinel.

Ari leaned against the bar, staring into a glass of something amber and toxic. His gold chain felt heavy. “I got the HITE weapon now. I cannot be stopped. They danced around like idiots, and I just… took it.”

Rocco polished a glass with a dirty rag. “You’re alive. That’s winning, kid.”

The air in front of the bar tore open.

It wasn’t a sound so much as a rip in reality’s fabric, a jagged wound of violet static and shrieking silence. The pressure change popped their ears. Glasses slid off shelves and shattered on the Kasei metal floor.

Pitt stepped through. Not walked. Emerged. He was bare-chested, green skin gleaming under the bar’s neon, gold fangs bared in a predator’s grin. The portable wormhole staff was in his hand, its tip still crackling with unstable energy. And beside him, moving with a loose-limbed, animal grace, was Baroba.

Pitt’s cousin was taller, leaner, his canine features sharp under a mess of cornrows. A thick gold chain swung against his chest. His eyes, intelligent and cold, scanned the room in a heartbeat. He didn’t speak. He just cracked his knuckles, the sound like dry sticks breaking.

Ari’s glass hit the bar. “You.”

Pitt’s laugh was a rasp. “Delivery service, clown face. You ordered one ass-kicking?”

There was no more talk.

Fozi was already moving, the reassembled plasma rifle coming up. Baroba was faster. He didn’t run; he flowed. One moment he was by the wormhole, the next he was inside Fozi’s guard, a bony elbow smashing into the ox-man’s snout. Fozi grunted, stumbling back, blood blooming on his burgundy fur.

101 lunged, his tablet-face a blank mask of fury. Pitt met him head-on, the wormhole staff swinging not as a tool, but as a club. It connected with 101’s shoulder with a sickening crunch of synthetic bone. 101 hissed, spinning away.

Ren dropped from the ceiling, telekinetic force slamming down like an invisible hammer. Pitt staggered. Baroba blurred, leaping onto a table and kicking off, a flying knee aimed at Ren’s head. The Grey Martian phased, letting the attack pass through him, but the disruption broke his concentration.

Ari didn’t go for Pitt. He went for the prize. The HITE weapon—a heavy, Zemord-forged resonator—was leaning against the stool next to him. He grabbed it.

Pitt’s eyes locked onto it. “Mine!”

The bar dissolved into a storm of splintering wood, searing plasma, and snarling violence. Ari fired the HITE. A visible shockwave, a distortion in the air, ripped toward Pitt. The green-skinned gang lord dodged, the wave carving a chunk out of the bar’s far wall instead. Rocco ducked behind the counter, swearing in three languages.

Baroba was a whirlwind. He fought with a terrifying, efficient brutality, using the environment as a weapon. He threw a stool at 101, kicked a bottle of high-proof synth-whiskey into a wall sconce, setting a small fire, and used the distraction to drive a kick into Fozi’s knee. Fozi roared, going down on one leg.

Pitt pressed Ari, the wormhole staff whirling. Each parry sent jarring shocks up Ari’s arms. He was strong, but Pitt was desperate, fueled by greed and a deeper, colder fury.

“You think you can hold what’s mine?” Pitt spat, forcing Ari back toward the shattered window.

“Came into my house!” Ari grunted, shoving back. “Again!”

With a final, heaving shove, Ari broke the clinch and bolted for the mirrored entrance. Not away—outside. Onto the narrow ledge that served as a porch a hundred meters above the mossy plains.

The fight spilled into the open air. The wind howled, tugging at clothes and fur. The world was a dizzying panorama of green and rust under a glitching sky. There was no room for error.

Pitt followed, laughing. Baroba flowed out behind him, keeping Fozi and 101 bottled up in the doorway with a flurry of strikes.

On the ledge, it was just Ari and Pitt. The HITE weapon between them.

Pitt feinted high with the staff, then swept low. Ari jumped, but the staff’s energy discharge caught his ankle. He cried out, stumbling, his balance gone. For a terrible second, he teetered on the edge, the long drop yawning beneath him.

Pitt lunged for the HITE weapon.

Ari, falling, didn’t try to save himself. He kicked out with his good leg, not at Pitt, but at the weapon. It skittered across the ledge, toward the open air.

Pitt’s eyes went wide. He made a desperate grab, his fingers closing around the resonator’s stock just as it went over the edge. The weight pulled him. He screamed, clawing at the rock with his free hand, dangling over the abyss, the HITE weapon swinging below him.

Baroba saw it. He disengaged from the door brawl in an instant. He didn’t run to Pitt’s aid. He turned, grabbed the still-sparking wormhole staff Pitt had dropped, and with a practiced motion, slammed it against the cliff face.

Another tear opened. Smaller, unstable. It hovered over the drop, right below Pitt.

“Drop it!” Baroba barked, his voice a low, commanding growl.

Pitt, white-knuckled, let go of the HITE weapon.

It fell—and vanished into the shimmering mouth of the wormhole. Baroba caught the staff, the energy field flickering dangerously. He reached down, grabbed Pitt’s wrist, and hauled him back onto the ledge with a single, powerful heave.

Pitt collapsed, gasping, then looked at his cousin and grinned, the terror replaced by triumph.

Ari pushed himself up, his ankle screaming. He looked from Pitt’s grin to Baroba’s cold, satisfied eyes, to the empty spot where the wormhole had just snapped shut. Taking his weapon with it.

Baroba helped Pitt to his feet. The two of them stood at the edge, backed by the infinite sky. Pitt dusted himself off, his swagger returning. He pointed a finger at Ari.

“Told you I’d take everything,” he rasped. Then he nodded to Baroba. “Let’s go.”

Baroba activated the staff. The air tore once more. They stepped backward into the violet static and were gone.

The silence on the ledge was broken only by the wind and the ragged breathing of the Bandits. Fozi limped out, clutching his knee. 101 leaned in the doorway, his shoulder visibly dented. Ren floated beside Ari, a silent question in his black eyes.

Ari didn’t answer. He stared at the empty space where his victory had just been stolen. Again. The HITE weapon, the power, the proof that he was climbing—gone. The gold chain around his neck felt like the only weight left in the world.

He turned his back on the drop and limped toward the shattered entrance of the bar. The fight for Hite was over. He had nothing to show for it but fresh bruises and the taste of his own blood. He felt hollow. Defeated.

Rocco was already sweeping up glass inside. He didn’t look up. “Whiskey’s on the house.”

Ari didn’t want it. He just wanted to not be here, on this cliff, in this skin, with this feeling. He slid onto a broken stool, the fight gone out of him, and stared at the warped reflection of his own tired face in the cracked mirror behind the bar.

He had lost.

•••

The victory was absolute, and it tasted like ashes.

In the war room on Deimos, the silence was a physical thing. Amara stood before the main strategium, the holographic feed of Mars rotating slowly. The black serpent was gone from the sky. Not defeated. Simply… absent. As if it had never coiled there at all. He had not conquered it. He had selected a universe where it had never been summoned.

The dimensional war was over. He had won by changing the rules of the game.

On the feed, the public forums scrolled, a river of curated opinion. The topic was the proposed decommissioning of the Erhas Engine and its potential replacement. The “Lamentations of the Moons” statue was a leading candidate. The debate was technical, fiscal, aesthetic. There was no undercurrent of terror. No memory of a monster dissolving students in the Academy quad. That timeline had been pruned.

Pluto Academy was mentioned only in passing, a footnote in discussions of historical educational models. Its influence had waned, its terrifying Dean a faint, smudged memory. Amara had rewound Vexa Krios’s corruption, severed the AI, but the true victory was subtler. He had collapsed the probability wave that gave the Academy its cultural gravity. It was still there, on Pluto, but its shadow no longer fell across the heart of Mars. He had reduced it to an institution, not a pillar of reality.

He could only delete ninety-nine percent of Vexa’s existence. A stubborn one-percent residue remained—a name in an archived faculty list, a blurred face in a group hologram, a vague sense of ‘that unpleasant administrator.’ It was the universe’s lint trap, catching the final, irreducible threads of a life. It was enough. Perfection was the enemy of the possible.

He had what he wanted. A stable Mars. A cowed bureaucracy. A path clear for his governorship, for Tommy’s future. The empire of fire felt closer than ever.

So why did the Keri Alu feel so cold?

He had sacrificed a piece of his own history to get here. The spectacular, public brawl with Vexa—the time-fracturing fists, the unraveling mech suit, the spire’s destruction—was gone. Not from his memory, but from the world’s. That raw, validating proof of his power, his willingness to become a monster to defend his own, was now a private phantom. The public saw only a shrewd politician who had out-maneuvered a stuffy academic board. They saw a calculator, not a conqueror.

He had traded a legend for a ledger. And the balance felt empty.

•••

In her spire suite, Karla V’al watched the same feed on a private pane. Her Atkan dress was a quiet, contemplative slate grey. The public forum discussing her statue was vibrant, intellectual. They debated the stability of its digiton lattice, the poetry of its psychic resonance, the efficiency of using an existing art-piece as civic infrastructure.

They did not discuss her father. They did not discuss the terrifying inheritance hidden in its code, the grief that was its foundation. Her private sorrow, her weaponized lineage, was being parsed into subcommittees and cost-benefit analyses.

A notification pulsed softly at the edge of her awareness—a secured, untraceable wave. Lumo. Her heart, against all training, clenched. It was just data, a pre-recorded splinter of him, but it was a thread.

She opened it.

A holographic schematic of the statue bloomed in the air before her. Not the public version. Her version. His annotations spiderwebbed across it, highlighting not the structural integrity, but the hidden chambers within the code. The vaults where her memories of him were stored. The emotional harmonics he’d mapped. At the very core of the schematic, he’d drawn a tiny, perfect lock. And beside it, a key shaped like a hybrid child’s laugh.

If they make you the heart, his voice, recorded weeks ago, whispered in her ear, make sure you control the heartbeat. The backdoor is in the weeping algorithm. Our daughter’s resonance frequency is the key. They’ll own the pump. You’ll own the pulse.

The transmission dissolved. Karla let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. The public forum continued to chatter, debating her soul as municipal property.

But she was no longer just the battlefield. Lumo, even fractured across time, had handed her a blueprint for the fortifications. Amara had won his war by making the world forget a fight.

She would win hers by remembering everything, and by hiding the most important piece where no one would think to look: in the architecture of surrender.

She turned from the screen, her hand resting on her stomach. The future was being written in committee minutes and temporal edits. But some secrets were too small, too vital, to be erased by a god-king’s will. They grew in the quiet, in the dark, waiting for their moment to turn the key.

•••

The walk away from the cliff was a silent, limping procession. The vertigo of the height was nothing compared to the hollow drop in Ari’s gut. Rocco’s Bar—their hard-won, vertiginous headquarters—was compromised. Smashed up, reeking of wormhole static and defeat. They couldn’t stay.

“We’ll find another cliff,” Fozi grunted, testing his injured knee with a wince. “One with better plumbing.”

“Priorities,” 101 stated flatly, his voice modulator buzzing from the damage to his shoulder.

Ren floated beside them, a grey spectre against the vast, terraformed plains below. His telepathic sigh was a whisper in the wind. “Siempre empezando de cero.” Always starting from zero.

Ari didn’t answer. He kept walking, his gaze on the dusty trail, the ghost of the HITE weapon’s weight still in his hands. Pitt’s gold-fanged grin, Baroba’s cold efficiency—they played on a loop behind his eyes. Everyone had a goddamn wormhole. Everyone got to cheat.

He was about to say just that, to spit another curse at the uncaring Martian sky, when the air ahead of them screamed.

This wasn’t Pitt’s crude, staticky rip. This was a surgical incision. The light didn’t just bend; it unfolded, revealing a vista that stole the breath from their lungs. Through the tear, they weren’t looking at another part of Mars. They were looking at the future.

A war room, vast and cold, carved from the dark rock of Deimos. Holographic star maps flickered like captive galaxies. And in the background, visible through a colossal viewport, hung the tiny, scarred moon of Phobos—encircled by a stolen, glowing energy ring that pulsed like a slow, mechanical heartbeat. A crown of plundered power.

Standing in the frame of this impossible window, one foot in their present, the other in that grim future, was Amara.

He was older. The lines on his face were carved deeper, his frame even more a mountain of muscle and menace under a battle-worn version of his red cape. The Kasei metal of his skull plate was scarred. The Keri Alu on his brow glowed with a tired, persistent fire. His eyes, when they found them, held the weight of centuries they hadn’t lived yet.

His gaze swept over the battered Bandits—Ari’s defiance, Fozi’s pain, 101’s damage, Ren’s stillness—and settled on the empty space between them. Where Lumo should have been.

“He’s scattered,” Amara’s voice boomed, not from the future, but from everywhere and nowhere, the sound vibrating in their bones. “Pulling himself thin across time. A failsafe breaking apart.”

Before anyone could react, Amara’s arm shot out—not through the wormhole, but as the wormhole. A tendril of solidified spacetime lashed into their midst, not at Ari, but at a point of empty air that suddenly crackled with frantic, cobalt-blue static.

Lumo’s transmission—a glitching, half-formed echo desperately trying to stabilize—materialized, yanked into visibility by Amara’s will. They saw his four eyes wide with panic and a strange, resigned understanding.

“You knew this day was coming,” Amara said, his voice grim with a prophecy fulfilled. The temporal tendril coiled around the spectral form of their friend.

“Boss, wait—!” Lumo started, lurching forward.

It was too late. Amara’s fist clenched in the future. In the present, the wormhole collapsed inward with a sound like the universe gasping. The tendril retracted, dragging the screaming, staticky image of Lumo back through the rip in time.

The last thing they saw was Lumo’s flickering form, his mouth open in a silent shout, one hand outstretched not for help, but in a desperate, aborted wave of farewell. Then the vision of Deimos, of the ringed Phobos, of the future Amara, snapped shut.

The air where the portal had been settled, normal and empty, carrying only the scent of ozone and deep-space cold.

Silence, heavier than before, crashed down.

Fozi stared at the spot. 101’s tablet-face scrolled through frantic, useless diagnostic glyphs. Ren simply hung in the air, his telepathic presence a hollowed-out void.

Ari stood frozen, his hands slowly curling into fists. The defeat from Pitt’s theft curdled, mixing with a new, boiling helplessness. They’d been kicked, robbed, and now… now they’d been edited. A piece of their crew literally plucked from the timeline by a god-king from tomorrow.

He looked at his empty hands. No HITE weapon. No Lumo. No win. No way to even fight back against something like that.

A sound escaped him—not a yell, not a curse. A raw, disbelieving laugh that held no humor at all. He tilted his head back, looking up at the glitching digiton smog, at the pale ghosts of the moons in the daylight sky.

“When,” Ari asked the uncaring heavens, his voice climbing from a whisper to a furious shout, “WHEN DO I GET A WORMHOLE?!”

His words echoed across the cliff face and died, unanswered. The dimensional war had reached out and taken its tithe. They were left standing in the dust, poorer, weaker, and utterly stranded in the present, while the future moved on without them.

ATILA

NEXT: The Martian Saga….. “RED BANDANA, PART 1”