Chapter 79

***This article contains spoilers.***

## Highlights

* The team saves Ashana and the High Council.
* Sakura learns cryokinesis and Rachel learns healing.
* Alyssa sees psychic echoes in the old Progenitor section of the Legacy, and passed out.
* The other Progenitor was watching the battle. Despite the Drakkar losing, his matriarch, Ailanthia, sees him smile, which is a rarity.

## Notes

### Miscellaneous

* Alyssa turned to face him so that he was no longer looking at her from behind. Linnaeus felt tinged with sadness as one set of perfect spheroids disappeared, but the sensation was fleeting as he was presented with another pair of marvellous orbs. The glowing Terran girl adopted an odd facial expression as she looked at him. Her smile was lopsided and she raised her left eyebrow as she watched him staring at her. How curious.

### Abilities

Sakura gets **cryokinesis**.

* A gentle flurry of ice crystals now shrouded her armoured fists, her gauntlets glowing with a soft white aura. The deathly silence was broken by a cracking sound - like a glacier shearing in half - as ice swept up her blades, riming them in hoar frost.

Rachel gets **healing**.

* Rachel convulsed against John’s hand, crying out as he applied his will to her body. He focused on enhancing her genetic code, his intent providing the framework for the powers he was gifting to her. This work was subtle and very different to anything he’d tried before. He felt some resistance, although it wasn’t coming from Rachel but from deep within himself instead - almost as if this was forbidden knowledge that should never be shared. He ignored that perplexing sensation, driving ahead with his plans for her and providing very specific instructions to the third helix of her DNA.
* She was about to reply when she gaped at his face in shock. A dark supernatural aura appeared around him, temporarily obscuring his features in shadows. Her natural reaction was to recoil from that fearful shroud; it was horribly disconcerting the way it obscured and confounded her senses, but in seeing it, she instantly knew his species. He was a Progenitor.
* Reminding herself that it was just John she was looking at and to stop being silly, she reached out to touch him, sensing that aura and getting a feeling for his wellbeing. Species: Progenitor - slightly fatigued ... lightly wounded; laceration to left bicep. She looked around with wide eyes, gazing up at Sakura who knelt beside her. The beautiful Asian girl was swathed in her own shroud and when Rachel touched her fingers to Sakura’s chest she was able to read that aura too. Species: Enhanced Terran - fatigued ... otherwise unharmed.
* Rachel turned to look at the Senior Councillor and even though she wasn’t well versed in a Grey’s anatomy, she knew he didn’t have long left. Ularean’s breathing was shallow and laboured, his white robe soaked with blood from the vicious sword wound to his abdomen. John had crouched down beside Ularean and she followed his lead, kneeling down beside the Ashanath leader. She reached out to place her hand on his bloodied torso, intent on getting a reading from his aura. Species: Ashanath – mortally wounded; severe damage to small and large intestines, internal bleeding, punctured spleen.
* Focusing on Ularean again, she instinctively knew what she needed to do to save him. As she focused on the Ashanath’s torn body, a misty glow pulsed out from her hand on the Senior Councillor chest and began knitting the flesh back together again. Toxins had been released into his body from the ruptured intestines, so she flushed those from his system, cleansing and purifying him as she worked. There were startled gasps from the gathered councillors as she slowly closed his ragged wound, repairing his body and saving him from the critical injury.

### Psychic Echoes

Alyssa gasped as a white-haired Maliri girl rushed through the door behind them, her face stricken with terror.

“Wait!” Alyssa cried out to the blue-skinned woman as she ran into the room, then blinked in shock when she rushed straight through Rachel’s armoured form.

Immediately realising what she was seeing, Alyssa turned to watch the psychic echo as the girl fled across the room. The Maliri sobbed with fear as she ran, before being thrown violently through the air and landing in a crumpled heap on the ground. It was clear from the awkward angle of her head that her neck had been broken with the impact. Alyssa felt a chill run down her spine as she felt the reverberation of terror the girl had experienced in her last moments.

Alyssa turned around in a daze as more psychic echoes began to appear. She saw one Maliri girl fiercely berating another, when the capacitor they were standing beside suddenly exploded, incinerating both of them in an instant. The blast had only just dissipated when a trio of young Maliri women brushed past her. Alyssa whirled around to watch them, sensing the initial tremors of pain beginning to build, forecasting their imminent and excruciating deaths. They walked calmly across the room, before abruptly clutching at their chests with strangled cries of agony. Their faces were masks of torment as they pitched over, once beautiful faces draining of life before Alyssa’s shocked eyes. The three girls convulsed in their death throes until their withered husks slowly faded away.

Alyssa flinched as a Maliri ghost screamed in terror, her face hollowing out as the life force was remorselessly sucked from her body.

She tried to ignore the deaths of hundreds of Maliri around her. The women had died in so many different ways, from accidents to deaths in combat, but by far the worst was seeing the vital young women have the life force sucked out of them. She did her best to ignore the Maliri death throes.

Movement off to her left caught her eye. She gasped as she turned to see a squad of armoured women in an intense gunfight with several armoured Maliri.

The sinister weapons sent streams of
dark-red bolts into their foes, overcoming what appeared to be shields, before punching into the Maliri’s armoured bodies. Both sets of women wore full body armour, the style eerily reminiscent of the very suit of Paragon armour she wore herself. Alyssa could see the faces of the Maliri’s attackers through the clear visors of their helmets and she gaped at their yellow skin and flaming red hair. Her eyes widened as she saw someone stalking towards them, someone she’d seen several times before...

Alyssa stood paralysed with the intensity of the psychic echo she was now experiencing, staring in a mixture of awe and fear at the man in her vision. This dreadful, imprinted moment had been dredged up from an archaic past, but it was from a time she had witnessed briefly before in the Nexus files...

Mael’nerak’s stern face was contorted with rage, his black goatee framing a mouth twisted with fury. Swirling vortexes of jet-black psychic energy whipped around his arms, the storms of energy matching his furious temper. Ghastly tendrils shot out from his fingers, spearing the yellow-skinned redheads through the chest. Their tortured cries of pain matched the terrible expressions of agony on their faces, as he lifted up nearly a score of the armoured women in his supernatural grip.

The black tentacles pulsated sickeningly, with bulges travelling down their lengths towards Mael’nerak’s fingertips. It took several agonising seconds for the women to die, horrific moments that Alyssa shared with the psychic imprint left etched into the room. With a strangled cry, she collapsed on the ground, overcome by the brutal intensity of such torment.

### The Dark One

In a sinister onyx chamber lit by dark-red lights, a black-cowled figure stared at an intricate Tactical Map, showing detailed technical readouts of every vessel in the system. He chuckled as he watched John Blake’s gaudy white ship gallivanting about, mopping up the last of the Drakkar forces. It took another five minutes to eliminate the last of the Drakkar, leaving the Invictus and the tattered remains of the Ashanath forces triumphant on that blood-soaked battlefield.

Making a sweeping gesture with his hand, he replaced the Tactical Map with an incredibly detailed overlay of this sector of the galaxy. The various half-baked “Empires” were highlighted in a variety of colours, with the major players depicted by three-dimensional pieces. His hand moved back across the map from left to right, ignoring the Enshunu and the Maliri, before pausing above a representation of the Drakkar.

He flicked the unspeakably hideous four-armed warrior with a finger and it toppled over with a crash, the note ringing with an air of finality, before the piece faded from view. Next, his fingers moved over the image of an unbearably ugly, bulbous-headed Ashanath and he flicked that over too. The thin alien tipped over on the board with a similarly final-sounding thump, before disappearing from sight. His incredulous laughter echoed around the gloomy chamber, light from the holographic map casting eerie shadows about the room.

“What IS he doing, Ailanthia?” he asked his Matriarch, sounding quite bemused.

Ailanthia had been standing silently by his side and she turned to look at him in shock. In the thousands of years she had served her master, he had never once addressed her in such a way. Slave - of course, Matriarch - often, but never by her actual name.

“My Lord?” she asked him tentatively, never having seen him act this way before.

He removed his black cowl, dropping it to his shoulders and revealing his handsome features. “No matter,” he replied, his lips quirking into a smile - another rarity. He appraised her for a moment with a discerning eye, before turning on his heel and striding for the door. He clicked his fingers as he did so, adding in an imperious tone, “Come, Ailanthia. I feel like celebrating...”

Her angular eyes widened further and she scurried after him obediently. Other than her periodic feedings to maintain her youthful vigour, this was yet another startling first. What was going on? He’d never expressed that kind of interest in her before! Her heart skipped a beat at the prospect, a smile lighting up her beautiful light-green face. She had dreamed of this moment for eons and she was determined to make it one her master would remember forever.

Practically walking on air, Ailanthia eagerly followed her master into his bedroom.