Page 80 of Destinies of Diamond
“We’ll be sending reinforcements to Hades Base at once, Your Highness. Please remain here. We will bring His Majesty back in one piece.”
“Thank you for your service, Commander Trevor, but I’m afraid I can’t just sit back and do nothing. I’m going with you.”
Despite the damage Tartarus City had received, we organized a strike team in record time. We had to resort to the students to boost the staff already present in Tartarus City, but they took it well and a large part of them had been involved in past skirmishes.
“We don’t have any real information on what we’re facing,” I warned them. “It could be an alien threat. It could be a terrorist attack. Stay together in your respective units and don’t do anything reckless.”
“Sir, yes, Sir.”
As we all headed toward our shuttles, I was gripped by a strange feeling, one I hadn’t experienced since the battle where I’d become a cyborg. It wasn’t exactly something I could define, more like an overall apprehension, a feeling of utter wrongness, a sense that something was about to go very wrong.
Ensconced in the cockpit of my vessel, I prayed to Tartarus that we wouldn’t be too late to save the others and tried to look at the situation on the bright side. At least Selene was out of harm’s way, on Terra.
Or so I believed, until I actually got to our destination. Nothing could have prepared me for what we found there. The moon was, for lack of a better word, burning. It should have been impossible, but there it was.
From orbit, we couldn’t get a good look at the buildings, not even through the sensors of our shuttles, and cyborg or not, I didn’t have the specs necessary to bypass that. But there were things that went beyond technology, and we could all feel it, down to the marrow of our bones.
There was something down there that went beyond any enemy we’d faced before.
I got my answer sooner than expected. A monstrous chimera appeared in our field of vision, so large we could’ve seen it even with the naked eye. Its three heads easily identified it as the original chimera, although only two of them—the lion and the snake—were active. It popped up roughly at the coordinates of Hades Base, but its body must have been miles wide.
“What in Tartarus’s name is that?” one of my subordinates asked over the coms.
It was a sign, a punishment, the consequence of our actions and foolishness. I didn’t say any of that. “Our target,” I told him instead.
Having something to do anchored them and if nothing else, the size of the creature made it easy for us to hit it. As we descended from space, though, I finally noticed something I shouldn’t have missed in the first place.
The neural scans coming from the creature’s brainwaves seemed strikingly similar to Selene. When I activated my implants to find a weak spot in its defenses, I was struck with the sudden knowledge that this wasn’t just a chimera.
Selene had always said that she believed her powers had been given to her for a reason. But no one could have ever expected the reason to be this.
Rendered mute, I hovered over the battle field. Looking at the gigantic beast, I tried to process what my systems were telling me, and yet, the information refused to compute.
For a few priceless seconds, I froze. I couldn’t move a muscle. I was distantly aware that I was supposed to give my men instructions, that we were in the middle of a fight here, but nothing was coming out.
And then, I saw them. The chimeras were back, only this time they no longer looked like machines. They were flesh and blood beings, and they were carrying their respective tamers on their backs.
Brendan’s voice echoed in the cockpit of my shuttle, although I couldn’t have said how he projected it through the coms. “Kill it! Take it down!”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” I replied, and tasted ash in my mouth.
I stared at the creature in front of me and a voice echoed in my head.“Believe in yourself. Just believe.”
The doubts were swamping me, threatening to swallow me whole. I had no choice but to follow along with everyone else. Selene was so important to the Grand Chimera Unit. Prince Brendan and the others must have a plan. They wouldn’t hurt her.
Of course, it soon became obvious that hurting Selene was the least of our problems. We organized ourselves in formation around the creature, now directed by Prince Brendan. Missiles and tachyon-fueled lasers struck the fleshy parts of her body. It did absolutely nothing. In fact, it only seemed to encourage her growth.
“She feeds on the tachyons,” I shouted. “Prince Brendan, we have to stop this.”
“No,” he replied. “Keep going. Everyone, even a chimera, has its limits. Even a Tartarus diamond can crack if exposed to enough pressure.”
There was logic in his strategy, but the problem with it was that the more firepower we focused on her, the less people we had at our disposal. It was utter chaos. The shuttles started falling like flies. Some exploded. Others simply crashed as their engines died, consumed by the chimera.
My shuttle miraculously survived, and I suspected that was no coincidence. The rest of them weren’t so lucky.
To give Brendan and his unit credit, they managed to intercept a lot of the blasts. Despite no longer being metallic, the chimeras seemed mostly immune to the creature’s fire. But if we were doing any damage to it, I couldn’t tell.
I didn’t know how long it lasted, but at one point, the surface of the creature’s skin started to crack. This was what Brendan had been waiting for.
