Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 4

Cataclysm

So, while Adam was going in on the jet, Sunny had chosen to join her family on a Drev drop carrier with the other warriors of her clan, Lanus and Sunny at their head.

Lanus, Sunny, Kanan, Dzara, the entire family together, and that at least made him feel better.

"You sure you're up for this." He asked, his voice strangely warped and tinny over the comms."

"Do I look like someone who can back out now."

"T-minus Ten, nine, eight, seven."

"Guess not.

And then there it was, the familiar pressure building up in the cradle of his pelvis. Adam sighed, Here he was a grown ass man, and still his body's nervous response was suddenly and and unexplainably needed to pee, even after several trips to the bathroom "just in case"

"Two, one zero."

.....

"Launch."

Hundreds of engines firing all at once, until the night sky was filled with the burning golden glow of their engines, like a swarm of fireflies. Adam took point, exiting the empyrean and passing through the docking bay field and out into the silence of space. All around him thousands of other smaller ships joined him, in thousands of different shapes and sizes. He could only imagine what it might have looked like from a distance.

Fireworks.

Maybe.

Their plan was to strike hard and fast.

No mercy

No remorse.

There was no room for polite warfare, this was the end of the universe as they knew it, and manners were out of place, and out of time.

Evidently the Vodi felt the same way.

As soon as the first fighter, Adam, deployed, the Void matched with a response of its own, spitting spiked jets painted with tortured orange voidlight straight towards them, like the pellets from the barrel of a shotgun. Adam felt like it should have had a sound, an explosion, or a crackle like fire, or even an eruption like a volcano.

But the violence happened in complete silence.

Though the clash that came rocked the universe.

The first death occurred, not from weapons, but as two opposing fighters slammed together in a brief but fiery ball of debris erupting outward like an explosive mine, shredding at least two fighters that came too close.

One listed sideways ramming into another fighter, the two falling into an interlocking spin that tore them apart. Adam cut to the side, and then dove down, cutting narrowly between the wings of two opposing ships, deploying countermeasure rockets as he was passing between them, tagging both enemy ships in the fuselage and ripping them apart with a sharp and silent explosion. The hammering of his heart died away, slowly lulled by combat until both his hands and his body were steady, silent and controlled. The pressure on his bladder vanished as the nerves went wit them.

Nothing mattered now, but the moment.

The sky was chaos, bumper cars on steroids strapped to explosives. Adam rolled to avoid an explosion on his left, cutting i na shallow arc under a vessel passing in the other direction. Fealty tagged enemy targets, highlighting them in red where his normal human vision would be unable to keep up.

He spun once, very sharply to his left, falling into the trailing path of an enemy fighter locking on briefly before deploying rockets.

The ship exploded, and he dove downward avoiding the debris.

Killing enemy fighters was all well and good, but he never took his eyes off the real goal.

The necrotorium, glowing orange like the promised hell that it was, still so far away and surrounded by a wall of steel rubbed raw by the sickly orange light of their shields.

A voice crackled in his headset "Cherub, This is mad dog Four o clock on your right"

"Think you can hack it mad dog." Adam asked,

"We're going to find out.

"This is wicked Eight o'clock high."

"Welcome aboard, wicked, try not to die." Adam said, and then Dove down and back into the frey. Behind him Wicked and Mad dog followed in desperation to keep on his tail. Adam called out his moves before he made them, and together they cut into the bulk of the enemy squadron.

Adam's dash beeped,

"He's trying to lock on me." Adam said.

"I got him, I got him. Cherub roll right!" Wicked shouted

Adam rolled right, his pursuer streaking through the palace where he had been and exploding a few seconds past that moment

"HA!" Wicked said, her voice crackling over the radio.

"Deploying countermeasures." Mad Dog shouted, and another explosion lightened the black sky.

They were moving forward, sure and steady. Adam cut at a diagonal past two incoming fighters and then reversed his engines coming to a halt and shooting backwards as they tried to turn. Fealty marked both, and deployed the heat seekers that found their mark. Adam rotated the jet on its axis 180 degrees and shot in the other direction.

They were coming up on the bulk of the Armada now.

Massive blak ships loomed over them.

One of the ships pulsed, a powerful beam of burning orange void light pulsed from its cannons, vaporizing a straight line of fighters in the process, leaving nothing behind but dust.

Fealty chirped in warning, and Adam cut right just as another beam shot through the place where he had been.

Wicked shouted.

Mad dog cursed.

The ball of steel rose up.... This was going to be too much.

How were they going to get through this and the shield?!

And then, Adam saw it.

It was a miracle that he did. What it took to have him here in the right place and at the right time might as well have been a miracle, and still he only noticed because out of all the red highlights on his dash, as fealty lit up his enemies, he couldn't help but notice the tiny dash of green.

A friendly.

At first Adam thought another jet might have made it ahead of him, but in the heat of the moment, as his subconscious brain was running in parallel to his active combat brain he realized the small dot wasn't moving, and it was far too small to be a ship.

Momentum carrying him closer, it wasn't until Adam was nearly right up on it that he realized.

The figure was humanoid.

Floating simply in the middle of space, gone unnoticed by the Void.

That fact wasn't to last long.

As the figure raised his hands, and let off a psychic wave of energy that almost imploded Adam's mind in the backlash."