The return journey was not a retreat, but a victory march in their young minds. The cockpit of the Whispering Claw hummed not with the tense silence of fugitives, but with the electric buzz of triumph. The air smelled of ozone, scorched metal, and their own unwashed, exhilarated fur.
Birman sat with a ceremonial stillness, his sapphire eyes distant, already composing the report in his head, the one that would frame their disobedience as visionary valor. Between his paws, he carefully polished a Nesutan wing-cutter, its serrated edge reflecting the starlight. A trophy. Burmilla danced her fingers over the navigation console in a silent, joyful rhythm, replaying the ship's violent ballet through Hss'tar's skies. Her own trophy, a commander's helmet, its visor cracked by a well-placed disruptor shot, rested in the co-pilot's seat.
Blade stood between them, a quiet statue gazing at the streaming stars. His body thrummed with a new, profound certainty. The Primal State was no longer a theory, it was a key he had turned within himself, unlocking a room of limitless potential. The thrill of the fight had been sweet, but the aftertaste was even more potent: the taste of destiny fulfilled. He had proven himself beyond simulations, beyond the Royals' fearful calculus. They would understand now. They would have to. He imagined the look in their eyes, not disapproval, but awe. His return would not be that of a chastised child, but of a prince claiming his birthright, blooded and undeniable. Planet Neko would be his stage, and its rulers his first, respectful audience.
"First pass in ten," Burmilla announced, her voice bright.
Birman straightened his posture, a perfect cadet once more. "Visual on the homeworld."
The blue-green jewel of Planet Neko swelled in the viewport. But something was... off. The familiar constellations of orbital traffic, the freighters, the patrol loops, the glittering seed-pods of civilian shuttles, were absent. The orbital defense platforms hung dark and silent against the star-flecked black.
A cold tendril, thin as a wire, threaded into Blade's gut.
"Sensors are... quiet," Burmilla said, her playful tone evaporating. "Too quiet. No transponder signals. No energy signatures from the cities. Just... background radiation."
"Take us to the Citadel approach vector," Blade commanded, his voice flat.
As they descended, the silence became a physical weight. No challenge from planetary defense. No guiding beacons from the spaceport. They broke through the cloud layer over the capital continent, and the three young Nekonians pressed against the viewport, their breath fogging the transparisteel.
Neo-Nekona was gone.
Where the neon-drenched spires and bioluminescent gardens had been, there lay a continent of glass. The surface had been subjected to a heat so absolute, so pure, that it had fused stone, metal, and life into a smooth, obsidian plain that reflected the sickly sun like a dead eye. No ruins, no skeletons, no shadows of the fallen. Only a terrifying, pristine emptiness. A void where a civilization had been.
A choked sound escaped Burmilla. It was a whimper, then a sob that shook her small frame. "Mama... Papa... Kiko..." Her younger brother's name was a shattered whisper. She slid from her chair, her paws over her face, as if to block out the sight of the world that had swallowed her family.
Birman did not weep. He stood rigid, his knuckles white where they gripped the back of Burmilla's seat. The polished wing-cutter fell from his limp grip, clattering on the deck. His sapphire eyes scanned the hellscape below, not with a soldier's analysis, but with a son's desperate, failing search for a single familiar contour. A tear traced a clean path through the dust on his cheek, but he made no sound. His silence was louder than any scream.
Blade did not weep either. Horror, vast and cold, flooded the chambers of his brilliant mind, but it was instantly flash-frozen by a hotter, sharper emotion: a cosmic, personal insult. This was to be his moment. His triumphant return. The first step of a glorious ascent. All of it, the throne, the recognition, the validation of his unparalleled power, had been erased. Not just taken, but annihilated, with an efficiency that mocked his petty conquest of a single city. His people, his future, his very stage, had been vaporized before he could claim them. The rage that ignited in his chest was so bright it burned away the grief. This was an offense. Not just against the Nekonian race, but against him.
"Burmilla," he said, his voice a blade of ice cutting through her sobs. "Plot a course for Planet Rune. Maximum burn."
She looked up, her green eyes wide with anguish and confusion. "Blade... our families..."
"Are gone. The perpetrators are not." His logic was merciless, a life raft in the sea of desolation. "This was a targeted extermination. A message. The Nekonian scout stationed at Rune was a listening post, a watcher. If someone wanted to wipe us out silently, they would have been next. A scout would have seen something. Recorded something."
His mind, already compartmentalizing the catastrophe, was a machine calculating vengeance. Birman, moving like an automaton, retrieved the fallen trophy and strapped himself back in. His duty had just been catastrophically redefined: from protecting a prince to avenging a species.
Planet Rune was a dusty, forgotten rock on the edge of contested space, its only feature a monolithic listening array. As the Whispering Claw settled on the cracked salt flats before it, they saw they were not the first to arrive.
A single figure stood in the wasteland, silhouetted against the dying red sun. He was tall, powerfully built, clad in sleek, battle-worn armor of grey and crimson. His posture was one of casual, arrogant dominion. An Inu. But not just any Inu. This one wore the insignia of a Glory-Master, a seeker of singular, reputation-making victories.
Shiba. The name clicked into place in Blade's memory from intercepted bulletins. A zealot of his breed's purity, a warrior who fought not for armies, but for the song of his own legend.
And the scene explained everything. The civilian centers hit first on Neko. The overwhelming, indiscriminate fury. This was no tactical strike. It was a performance. A cleansing, scripted by Shiba to cast himself as the galaxy's savior and forever paint the Nekonians as the monstrous villains who demanded such absolute retribution.
Blade's blood turned to fire in his veins. This smug, preening creature was the author of the void. The thief of his destiny. The obliterator of Burmilla's laughter and Birman's quiet pride.
No words were needed. The trio moved as one, a single organism of grief and rage. Birman, his sorrow forged into an unbreakable shield of purpose, surged forward with guard-trained precision, drawing Shiba's focus. Burmilla, her tears channeled into a frantic, zig-zagging assault, strafed with her disruptors, creating openings. And Blade... Blade was the lightning strike. He channeled the Primal State not with the joyful control of Nesuto, but with a focused, white-hot hatred. He moved faster than he ever had, a blur of spotted gold and ebony, his strikes aimed to shatter bone and sever life.
It meant nothing.
Shiba didn't even bother to draw his weapon. He stood, a statue of contempt, as their perfect, synchronized storm broke against him. Birman's powerful strikes, which could dent hull plating, landed with a sound like slapping stone. Burmilla's searing disruptor bolts dissipated against a personal energy field with a faint fizz. Blade's claws, which could carve stone, scraped harmlessly across the Inu's armor.
Shiba yawned. "You see?" he said, his voice a bored, condescending rumble. "Your struggle is biology. An ant colony, no matter how coordinated, does not topple a dinosaur. It merely annoys it before it is crushed underfoot."
Then, he moved.
It was not speed as they understood it. It was the universe skipping frames. One moment he was standing; the next, Burmilla was a limp doll hurtling through the air, a crater of cracked salt blooming where she landed, the whump of impact reaching their ears a second later. Birman cried out, lunging to defend her, only for Shiba to catch him by the throat. The Inu slammed the Nekonian boy into the ground, once, twice, a third time, with a sickening, rhythmic finality. The sound was not of breaking bones, but of continents colliding. Birman went still, a broken puppet in the dust.
Blade screamed, a raw, animal sound. He fought on, a dervish of desperate fury. He broke his arm blocking a blow meant to behead him, and without a flinch, bit his own forearm to force the shattered limb into a usable position, firing weak, pain-fueled energy beams from his free hand. He was a masterpiece of willpower defying annihilation.
Shiba laughed. A genuine, delighted sound. "Magnificent! The last spark of a dying fire. How bright it burns!" He ended the game with a casual swipe that sent Blade sprawling, then placed a heavy, armored boot on the young Nekonian's chest, pinning him like a specimen. The pressure was immense, a promise of total collapse.
"The universe will thank me," Shiba mused, looking down at Blade's defiant, pain-wracked face. "No more Nekonian impurity. No more feral, climbing beasts to threaten order. And most importantly..." His eyes glinted with a personal, secret fear. "No vessel for a foolish legend. No 'Tiger' will ever rise from this ash."
He raised his fist, energy crackling around it, poised to deliver the final, purifying blow.
The air directly above them screamed and split open.
A wound of violet-black energy, reeking of sulfur and static, tore reality apart. From it poured a tide of nightmares, lanky, grey-skinned demons with too many joints and grasping claws. They did not attack Shiba. They moved with a terrifying, unified purpose. Three of them snatched up the broken bodies of Blade, Birman, and Burmilla. Others formed a screeching, living wall between them and the Inu.
Shiba's triumph morphed into apoplectic rage. "NO!" he roared. His fist, meant for Blade, blasted forward, vaporizing two demons into ichor and smoke. But it was a distraction. In that split second, the demons with their prizes scuttled back through the pulsating portal.
Blade, hanging limp in a demon's grasp, caught one last glimpse of Shiba's furious, thwarted face through the chaotic swarm. Then he saw past him, into the portal's depths. For an instant, he saw a throne of blackened bone in an endless hall of screams, and upon it, a figure of smoldering shadow who watched with calm, infernal satisfaction.
The portal snapped shut.
On the salt flats of Rune, Shiba stood alone amidst the fading violet motes and dissolving demon flesh. He howled his frustration to the red sun, crushing the skull of one remaining, twitching fiend under his heel. His victory, his glorious end to the Nekonian blight, had been stolen. Not just stolen.
Given a destination.
The last Nekonians were not dead. They were in the hands of something older, hungrier, and infinitely worse. And as the silence returned to the wasteland, it was a silence that now tasted not of victory, but of a dreadful, cosmic joke.12Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ8crKGI2ERF
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