The body of Drelvak the Devourer hadn’t even cooled before Tartarus command moved into high alert.

  Rizer sat in the command chamber, blood drying beneath his fingernails. Elias was unconscious, sedated after the surge of psionic force that had nearly cracked the ridge apart. Around them, the surviving elite team watched monitors flash with data, motion near Gaia-9, heat signatures under Earth’s crust, and something else. A disturbance in the psionic field. Like a knot tightening, unseen.

  General Halveth crossed his arms. “You both survived. Barely.”

  “I didn’t come here to survive,” Rizer muttered. “I came to win.”

  Halveth smirked. “You’re your grandfather’s blood, alright.”

  Rizer looked up. “You knew him?”

  “Before he vanished? Everyone on Earth knew Silas Kade. He was one of the last human engineers who scared the Odryix.” Halveth paused. “And apparently… he left you more than just a modified pod.”

  A screen flickered. A new feed opened. Grainy, black and white, but unmistakable.

  Adelpha Rae, standing in a flooded corridor beneath Earth's crust, torchlight dancing off the walls. Her voice echoed through static:

  “We rise in seven nights. If Tartarus can hear this… don’t forget Earth. We are still fighting.”

  The room fell silent.

  Even Halveth looked shaken. “She’s alive. I thought…”

  “She’s the reason humanity still exists under there,” Rizer whispered. “She raised me when the world fell apart.”

  Halveth turned to him. “She’s not waiting. Neither should you.”

  Meanwhile, on Gaia-9…

  In the clinical white halls of the outer medical wing, Commander Vale stared at a blinking monitor, red lights tracing paths where Laziel Thorn had moved before the reactor breach. The sabotage hadn’t just weakened defenses, it had reprogrammed part of the AI defense net. Gaia-9 had been partially blinded.

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  “There’s a rat in paradise,” Vale said grimly.

  Beside him, a young student named Liora, an orphan raised on Gaia-9, tightened her jaw. She had been Laziel’s protégé. “He was always working late. Always asking about Tartarus frequencies, Earth tunnels, access codes.”

  Vale gave her a slow, careful look. “And you?”

  “I want to stop him.”

  Her fingers tightened around a silver wrench, etched with an old rebel phrase: Forge the future with fire.

  Back on Tartarus, Elias awoke in a dim room. His eyes glowed faintly in the dark.

  “Rizer?” he whispered.

  His brother was already beside him, hand on his shoulder.

  Elias trembled. “I… felt everything. Drelvak wasn’t just fighting you. He was in me. And I, I couldn’t stop it.”

  Rizer shook his head. “You saved me. Don’t ever doubt that.”

  “But I’m changing.”

  “We both are.”

  They looked out the window, past the fractured horizon. The training fields below were alive with movement. Psionic users, no longer hidden,

  were stepping forward across Tartarus. There were more. Survivors who had passed for normal. Latent. Undiscovered. And now?

  Now the spark had caught fire.

  But only two were true prodigies.

  Only two burned with ancient intensity: Rizer and Elias.

  Far below Earth’s surface, in the drowned metro tunnels of Old London, Adelpha Rae held her hand against the stone wall. A heartbeat thrummed beneath her palm.

  Her scouts returned with a prisoner, an Odryix scout captured alive. Scarred. Weak. But still grinning.

  “You think I’m afraid of a relic like you?” he spat.

  Adelpha didn’t flinch.

  “I was there when your kind fed on our skies,” she said. “Now I’m under your skin.”

  She nodded to her lieutenant.

  The Odryix never got to scream.

  At the same moment, in a sealed war chamber on Tartarus, Rizer was tested once more.

  An elite Odryix infiltrator, disguised as one of their own, lunged from the shadows, an ambush designed by the traitor Thorn, who had fed their movements to the enemy.

  Rizer barely had time to react.

  The creature struck him with a psionic disruptor, and everything went white-hot, memories bleeding together, timelines fracturing in his mind. Elias as a baby. Kiera screaming “Survive.” Their grandmother clutching his hand. The night the sky burned.

  But instead of breaking..

  Rizer awakened.

  The energy in the room inverted.

  The infiltrator froze, horrified.

  “I’ve seen the end,” Rizer said coldly. “And it doesn’t belong to your kind.”

  Then, with no weapon, just force of will, he unleashed a psionic blast so massive, the walls screamed and the creature disintegrated in midair, turned to ash.

  A stunned silence followed.

  Only Halveth spoke, hoarse. “He’s not just a soldier now. He’s our weapon.”

  Elsewhere, Laziel Thorn knelt before a shadowed figure inside a data chamber on the edge of a burning moon.

  The screen behind him flickered, Lord Ankura watched silently.

  “The boy is ascending,” Ankura muttered. “But he’s still young. Still fractured.”

  “Do you want him dead?” Thorn asked.

  Ankura didn’t blink. “No. I want him desperate. I want him to suffer. Then I’ll consume what remains.”

  He stepped forward into the light, half burned from a previous war. His jaw exposed, his eye replaced with molten crystal.

  “I want their legacy... extinct.”