Perhaps," the old man muttered, glancing at a data-slate, "you have made this one too strong."
The Empress smiled. Just a little. It was a thing of absolute serenity.
"The warp has not touched him," she said. "He is… perfect."
Malcador's brow furrowed. "They all are. In their own ways. Perfection is not uniform, my lady."
"No," she agreed, and looked at me again. "But this one has balance. His soul is… anchored."
I didn't understand the words. Not yet. But I felt them. I remembered them. Somewhere deep, deep in the parts of me that were already more than human.
"I am sorry for what I must make of you, little lost soul." she said at last. The gold of her gaze softened. "But you will not be alone. Your brothers and sisters grow nearby. You will have family."
She leaned in, her forehead resting against the glass.
"Alexander. Sleep. Your time will come."
And her voice, oh, that voice, washed over me like a tide.
"…Alexander? Really?"
"…We have to stick to the classics…"
Her power affected me, and I drifted back into the abyss. Safe. Warm. Cradled in divinity and power.
Wait… Empress? Sisters?!
The thought rushed through me before sleep claimed me.
Somewhere in the lab, a machine noted the spike in psychic potential and filed the data away.
Subject II: Stable.
Neural Growth: Accelerated.
Soul Resonance: High.
I awoke to pressure and heat. A tremendous force squeezed my chest, as if gravity itself had grown angry.
Everything was shaking. The pod. My body. My thoughts.
I opened my eyes.
Not fluid. Not warmth. The walls groaned as if being torn apart. Sirens screamed, a bone-deep howl I somehow understood to mean danger, terminal descent, impact imminent.
I was no longer in the lab. Thoughts came to me like lightning. The Empress, Malcador, the lab, Ἀλέξανδρος, Alexander.
Memories pounded in my skull like fists on iron. Fragmented, blazing with clarity one moment, then slipping away like smoke the next.
I saw her, the Empress. She stood beyond the glass of my incubation pod, radiant as a star. Her golden eyes met mine through the nutrient fog, and for a breathless instant, I remembered what it felt like to belong. She was smiling, the way a creator might smile at their favored creation.
A white coat hung from her shoulders, half-buttoned over a golden tunic. She chewed cutely on a pen, the metal glinting between her perfect teeth. Her other hand moved swiftly, scribbling calculations onto a clipboard and parchment. The air around her shimmered with data-streams and the soft glow of cogitator banks.
The Empress had built me for war. And somewhere, far beyond the stars, she was waiting for me to rise.
Names have power.
I sat up too fast and slammed my head into the curved ceiling. It didn't hurt. Not really. I blinked and raised a hand.
Big.
The fingers were mine, but they weren't. Sculpted like marble. Veins thick as cords under skin too smooth to be real. I turned it, flexed it, felt every tendon move like a steel cable under tension. The fluid in my pod was just gone.
My mind raced. Not in a metaphorical sense. Thoughts erupted in terrifying speed. Language, physics, memories, old ones, not mine. Neural pathways lit up like a map of stars. Concepts clicked into place faster than I could track them.
I looked down.
I was almost naked. Clothed only in some smooth synthetic wrap that clung to my skin like a second layer of flesh. My legs were muscled. My chest and shoulders wide enough to block the emergency lighting above.
Thirteen, maybe fifteen in appearance. But no boy had ever looked like this.
A Primarch body, mind and soul.
The pod lurched violently. Something slammed into the outer hull and the lights blinked out, leaving only crimson emergency strips flashing in rhythmic pulses.
Thud-thud-thud-thud, my heart pounded like a war drum.
I leaned toward the viewport, driven by a mixture of instinct and terror. Grabbing the frame with one hand, I pulled myself up to stare out.
Flames.
The atmosphere burned around me in long, orange ribbons. The pod was a comet, punching through a world's sky with murderous intent.
Below, the surface curved across the horizon in a black silhouette. Clouds boiled beneath me. A continent lay sprawled under cover of night, lit not by nature, but by civilization.
Megacities.
From orbit I could see it all. Endless grids, strange spirals, clusters of shifting luminescence.
The planet's surface was broken open with artificial scars, miles-wide craters turned into extraction pits, mountains leveled into slabs for infrastructure. Hive spires rose like jagged blades stabbing through the clouds, their tips adorned with red and green lights that blinked like angry stars. Some of the megastructures leaned under their own weight, surrounded by slums that wrapped around their bases like parasites feeding off a decaying god.
Highways of light threaded between the cities, arteries of motion where ships flowed like blood cells. But there was no beauty here. No harmony. It was function stacked upon function. Hive upon hive. Smoke-choked sprawls that pulsed with life and labor, unending.
And at the edge of one of these monstrous metropoles, a single flare of fire marked my descent. One pod, one godling, falling into a world that had long since forgotten it once belonged to Man.
I recognized none of it. This was not Earth.
Terra, my mind screamed at me.
I leaned closer, heart in my throat.
Warhammer 40k…
"Oh no," I whispered. The words tore free from a throat deeper than mine had ever been. Rich. Resonant. Wrong. "No no no no no—"
I staggered back. My foot caught on the internal scaffolding and I tumbled, smashing into the wall hard enough to dent it. Alarms screamed louder.
The pod was screaming too. Vents opened to spray coolant. Inertial dampeners flared as the descent angle shifted. The lower hull turned red, glowing with the heat of reentry.
I tried to breathe. Failed. My lungs were too big, too strong, pulling in more air than I needed. Panic surged.
It wasn't just the body. It was the mind. Too many thoughts. Too many sensations. I could hear the turbulence outside, feel the gravity well pulling at every atom in the metal.
This was real.
The pod shook again. Harder. G-forces slammed me back into the crash webbing as the altimeter shrieked inside my skull in pulses of binary data I shouldn't have been able to process, but I did.
My muscles tensed. I braced.
Impact in five… four…
A blinding light filled the pod.
Three… two…
I screamed. I think.
One.
Then the world ended.
The pod hit something. Then everything. A shockwave tore through the superstructure. The walls twisted inward. The viewports exploded. The ground rose up like a titan's fist and slapped the pod sideways, throwing me against a metal bulkhead. I felt ribs crack. Then reknit. Then crack again as the rolling didn't stop.
There was a final, thunderous crash. The sound of a mountain collapsing onto itself. A split-second of weightlessness.
And darkness.
Pure. Absolute.
Pain brought me back.
It was dull, at first. Then sharp. A throb in my shoulder, a sting across my left forearm. I groaned and shifted, metal creaking beneath me.
Smoke drifted in lazy coils inside the shattered pod. Sparks danced from ruined consoles. The acrid stench of scorched wiring filled my nostrils.
I coughed. Sat up.
The pod was tilted at an angle, half-buried in concrete and twisted rebar. The crash had cratered the landing zone and embedded the lower hull deep into some kind of foundation layer.
I blinked slowly.
My vision adjusted instantly, switching through a dozen spectrums.
I looked down.
A deep gash, from elbow to wrist, was torn across my left arm. Muscle fibers pulsed like coiled ropes. Bone glinted through the torn flesh.
I stared.
Then it closed.
Tendons knit together. Skin pulled itself shut like time reversing. No pain. No scar. Just new, unblemished flesh.
"…Holy shit."
The words left my mouth before I could stop them. My voice still felt wrong. Rich. Deeper than a teenager's had any right to be.
I was alive. Not just alive, I felt indestructible.
I stood, slowly. The internal servos of the pod whined weakly. Some of the restraints had snapped during the crash. The rest hung uselessly. The main hatch blinked red, sealed tight.
I reached for the manual override.
Nothing.
Something in me… twitched.
I pulled back my arm. Focused.
And drove my heel into the pod door with all my strength.
The sound was deafening. The metal screamed as it bent, crumpling like paper. The hinges snapped. The hatch flew outward, slamming into the rubble with a crash loud enough to echo through the world.
Light poured in.
Real light. Harsh and ugly.
I stepped out of the ruin and froze.
The world around me was wrong. Towering buildings loomed above me like titans of steel and rust. Enormous towers bristled with antennas and rotating cogitator arrays. Pipes the size of freight trains ran along the walls, belching steam into the air. Walkways spanned between structures at impossible heights. Girders crisscrossed the sky.
It was… a city. But one that screamed dystopia at me.
Don't tell me I am in a hive world…
The air was thick with fumes. The ground was slick with grease and oil. Every surface was metal or ferrocrete, scorched by centuries of use. The smell was industrial rot, ozone, chemical waste, and overheated steel.
No trees. No earth. No sky.
Except, above, there was a sky. A glimpse. Cloud-choked and distant, but open. Not a fully sealed hive.
That confused me.
A hybrid city?
A minor sprawl connected to a greater hive structure?
I turned slowly. The crater behind me was massive. Smoke trailed upward into the sky. A few charred corpses lay nearby, partially vaporized. No survivors. No spectators.
Too quiet. I was alone. I should've panicked.
Instead, I crouched. Placed one hand on the metal street and stared at the rust stains and grease pools with a mind already calculating angles.
I needed a vantage point.
I needed information.
I needed control.
The nearest structure rose fifty meters above me, its side lined with exhaust pipes and lift rails. Ladders zig-zagged along the edge. Without thinking, I started forward, naked, barefoot, body wrapped only in the remnants of synthetic padding that had survived the crash.
I reached the ladder. Grabbed the lowest rung. It bent slightly under my grip. I reached the first platform. Turned. Looked out over the metallic valley below.
Smoke rose from several distant stacks. A train hissed and clanked across a suspended rail a few kilometers out, hauling massive cargo containers etched with symbols I recognized as a derivative of greek.
The city stretched around me like a living machine, an endless sprawl of metal and fire. I might have once called it beautiful, perhaps it had been, long ago. But whatever grace it had once known was buried beneath centuries of exploitation. Now it was a dystopia of industry, noise, and relentless motion.
Sky-cars buzzed through the air in tight patterns, weaving between towers like wasps circling a corpse. Elevated train lines coiled across the city like iron veins, connecting one factory block to the next. Great mechanical arms moved in the distance, shifting cargo crates the size of buildings from dock to depot.
Endless layers of hab-blocks, factories, transit rails, and smoking chimneys sprawled to the horizon. Here and there, flashes of moving lights marked patrol drones or skimmer convoys. Further out, I saw the silhouette of a foundry-fortress, its furnaces vomiting red light into the dark sky like some ancient volcano. High above, another cargo train thundered past on a suspended rail, dragging a dozen containers marked with stenciled glyphs.
I had no idea where this was, I could remember everything, a perfect memory coming from my engineered genes, but no memory of endless books and wikis told me where I was.
I need to get back to the pod…
I was halfway down the ladder, maybe three stories from the ground, when I heard it.
Footsteps.
I froze, pressed myself against the structure's side, and listened.
Voices followed, if you could call them that. Clicks, guttural warbles, and chittering syllables filled the air, accompanied by the faint whine of something mechanical powering up.
Weapons.
I climbed back down, silent as shadow, and crouched beside the base of the ruined pod. Smoke still billowed from it in slow, lazy curls, masking my presence.
Then they came into view.
Five of them.
Humanoid, but only just. Reptilian features, scaled skin ranging from obsidian black to swamp green. Long, sinewy limbs, clawed feet, armored chests, and tails that moved like whips. Their eyes gleamed like molten copper in the half-light, and each one carried a long rifle with a crystal core that pulsed with energy.
The lead one barked something. A series of sharp clicks and low growls. It pointed toward the crater.
My crater.
A second creature advanced cautiously, gun raised. It scanned the pod, then sniffed the air. Its nostrils flared, its frills extended like a lizard sensing prey.
I held my breath.
Whatever this species was, they weren't from any Warhammer canon I knew. Or maybe they were part of the deep lore, the kind that only showed up once, in the margins of a decades-old codex I had never read.
Given I seem to be the second primarch… This species probably died with me.
One of them stopped in front of a nearby door. It looked like a maintenance hatch or a broken storefront, warped inward from the shockwave of the crash.
The xenos hissed something in its garbled tongue.
Then kicked the door in.
A scream followed.
Human. Female.
I tensed, watching from cover as the reptilian brute dragged someone out into the light.
She looked half-dead. Thin, filthy, and bloodied. Blonde hair matted with soot, clothes in tatters. She stumbled and fell to her knees, coughing.
The xeno leader barked something again, louder this time. The words clicked and growled, but then, under the harshness, something shifted.
The language changed.
Still rough, but intelligible.
"Where... child?"
I blinked.
It had spoken in Greek.
I know Greek now?
It had spoken the language I knew from Earth.
She screamed again. "I don't know! I told you, I don't—!"
Another blast echoed from inside the building. Screams. Then silence.
My fists clenched.
The alien raised its rifle. Pointed it at her head.
Enough.
I stepped out from cover.
"Hey," I said.
Five heads turned. The woman froze. The xenos snapped to alert.
I could feel it again, that slow boil of energy under my skin. The wrongness that felt right. Like the air itself was holding its breath.
The lead xeno growled and stepped forward, weapon raised. "Identify."
I smiled.
"No."
Then I moved.
The world slowed to syrup. My foot hit the ground, and the pavement cracked. I sprinted forward, faster than I'd ever moved in my life, faster than a car, faster than a train. The wind howled past my ears.
The first shot grazed my cheek. I barely felt it.
The second I caught mid-air, my fingers closing around the barrel of the alien's weapon. The rifle discharged directly into my palm with a crackling surge of plasma.
It burned.
Then stopped.
I crushed the rifle in my hand. The alien's eyes widened in the moment before my other fist caved in its skull.
Bone. Brain. Blood.
Gone.
The others reacted. Too slow.
One raised its gun. I was already on it. My elbow struck its throat. Cartilage shattered. A follow-up kick sent its body flying ten meters down the street.
Two left. One tried to run.
I grabbed it by the tail, spun, and threw it like a hammer into a wall.
The last one was smarter. It dropped its weapon and raised both clawed hands.
"Yield!" it hissed. "No... harm!"
I stepped forward, blood still dripping from my fists. I looked it in the eye.
"No," I said coldly.
Then I ended it.
The street fell quiet again. The woman was still on her knees, shaking. Her eyes locked onto me like I was something between a savior and a monster.
I knelt beside her.
"You're safe," I said.
She recoiled.
I didn't blame her.
She spoke at last, voice hoarse.
"They came looking for... for a boy. A child."
How did they know I would be here? Chaos shenanigans?
I looked toward the broken building. Bodies lay inside. Civilians. Not soldiers. Hiding from monsters.
Sound came from a side alley once more, sounds of xenos running and the clicking of their language.
I crouched low beside a ruined wall, eyes locked on the cracked avenue ahead. The woman I'd saved huddled behind me, trembling, her fingers wrapped around a rusted pipe like it might somehow protect her.
"Stay quiet," I whispered.
She didn't answer. Just nodded, eyes wide.
There were six of them this time. Larger than the first patrol. Heavier armor, darker scales. One carried a heavy rifle that hissed with barely-contained plasma. Another had something like a whip crackling with energy. Officers?
Didn't matter.
I reached down and wrapped my fingers around a chunk of rebar and concrete. The thing had to weigh at least a hundred kilos. I lifted it like a stick.
One of the xenos barked, raising its head to scent the air.
I threw the rock.
It howled through the air like a comet and crunched into the side of its head. Bone exploded. The creature crumpled without a sound, half its skull missing.
The others snapped into motion. Their rifles came up fast. Too fast for a normal man.
But I wasn't normal.
I was already moving.
I closed the distance between me and the closest one in four strides. Its rifle hissed, something sizzled past my ear, but then my shoulder drove into its chest with the force of a charging rhino.
There was a wet, meaty pop. Ribs caved in. It hit the ground like a dropped bag of meat.
Two more opened fire. One bolt of energy slammed into my side, another into my left thigh.
Pain. Real, burning pain. But manageable.
I roared, voice echoing through the metal alleys like a primal storm, and grabbed one of their rifles mid-burst. The alien tried to wrench it back, claws scraping against the grip, but I drove my fist into its jaw and heard the satisfying crack of shattered bone.
The rifle buzzed in my hand. Alien tech, sleek and cold, glowing with hostile energy. But it spoke to me.
Somehow, I understood it. Like my hands remembered things my mind didn't. I flipped the weapon sideways, aimed at the remaining xenos, and pulled the trigger.
Light. Heat. Sound like a dragon screaming.
Three of them dropped instantly. Their bodies burst into flame, armor melting from the inside. One tried to run. A second shot tore its torso in half mid-stride.
Only one remained.
It had a claw around the woman's throat.
"Stop!" it hissed. "Stop or she dies!"
I didn't stop.
I took one step forward.
The xeno tightened its grip, its weapon raised.
"I said—"
I pulled the trigger.
The energy bolt hit the creature square in the chest. It exploded into black mist and burning gore. The woman dropped to her knees, coughing, covered in blood that wasn't hers.
Silence.
Just the whine of the cooling rifle, and my own breath heaving in my lungs.
I dropped the weapon.
My hands were burned. Smoking in places. One of the plasma shots had cooked a chunk of my side, it sizzled now, skin knitting itself back together with eerie speed. I could feel the heat retreating, the tissue sealing without scar.
I stepped over the corpse of the last alien and knelt beside the woman. She was shivering, staring at me like I was one of them.
"Hey," I said, voice softer now. "You're safe. It's over."
She blinked.
Her lip trembled. Then, hesitantly, she reached out.
I took her hand.
Calloused fingers. Nails chipped. She had the look of someone who hadn't eaten a proper meal in weeks. But she clung to me like a lifeline.
Her eyes welled with tears. She leaned forward, forehead pressing to my chest.
I let her. She needed something to hold onto. Something human.
I looked around at the carnage. Bodies steaming on the concrete. Smoke rising into the air. The quiet between battles.
It wouldn't last.
More would come. Dozens. Hundreds. They'd seen my escape. They were hunting for me. And now they had a reason to hunt harder.
But for the first time since I fell out of the sky, I had more than just questions.
I stood slowly, pulling her up with me.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Ariana," she whispered. "Ariana Delos."
"Ariana," I repeated, then nodded. "We need to move. Fast. Somewhere safe."
She nodded, still clinging to my arm. "I... I know a place. Not far."
I looked down the street. The towers loomed like sentinels. This city was a prison, a battlefield, and a mystery all at once.
And how the fuck am I supposed to conquer a Xeno held planet?
-END-
Author's Note: Hey! So, new fic. Half the reason this became a fic was a female emperor fic someone posted in another forum lol, I hope you enjoy it! And make sure to comment your ideas. Support me on Patreon. If you'd like to read ahead 10 chapters and support my writing, you're welcome to check it out.
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Chapter 2 — The Girl and the City
She didn't let go of my hand.
Even with blood drying on her skin and the scent of smoke thick in the air, she dragged me forward like a woman possessed. We sprinted down rust-stained alleys and through broken doorways, winding through the bones of the city.
Dawn was breaking. A dull, sickly light that filtered through smog and ash, bleeding across the horizon like an open wound.
"This way," she gasped. "Almost there."
I followed, steps thudding against rusted metal. The city felt empty, but I knew better. Something watched. Somewhere above or beneath, more of those xenos, Dereniks, she'd called them, were moving.
She ducked into a crumbling tenement, pushing through a battered door held together with bent rebar. Inside, the stench of oil and sweat hung heavy. Dim light flickered from a sputtering lumen-strip on the ceiling.
Then I saw him.
A man, sprawled on the floor. Thin. Bearded. His chest was soaked with blood, riddled with cauterized wounds.
Ariana fell to her knees beside him.
"Father..." Her voice broke.
I stood frozen. A sense of helplessness that didn't belong to this life. For a moment, I wasn't a godling from a golden cradle. I was just... someone watching a girl lose everything.
She clutched at his hand, whispering broken words I couldn't hear. Then she screamed. Not loud. Not dramatic. A raw, animal sound. The kind of grief that comes when there's no one left to hear you.
I knelt beside her. Reached out slowly. Put a hand on her shoulder.
"I'm sorry."
She didn't flinch. Didn't pull away.
"He... he told me to hide when the sirens went off. He said he'd be back." Her voice was hoarse. "He tried to stop them."
I looked at the burn patterns. Plasma. Precision shots. Executed.
God… What a mess…
"We have to go," she said suddenly. Her eyes were red, but her voice was steady. She wiped her face with a trembling hand and stood. "They'll be back. Dereniks don't leave alarms unanswered."
I glanced back through the cracked doorway. My pod was only a few blocks behind us. Hidden by rubble. But it wouldn't be long before the xenos found it. Or tried to.
I hesitated.
That pod was more than a lifeboat. It was a relic of Terra. There might be data in there, secrets of who I was, what I was built to become. It was a thread back to the Empress and Terran tech. Probably the most advanced in human held hands right now.
I clenched my fists.
But I couldn't drag it. I couldn't hide it. And I wouldn't risk Ariana.
They wouldn't know how to interface with it. Even if they broke it open, Terran tech was designed to be incomprehensible to lesser minds.
I hoped.
"We'll come back for it," I said quietly. A lie. Or maybe a prayer.
Ariana gave me a confused look, but didn't question it. She was already grabbing a small satchel from beneath a loose panel in the floor. A few ration bars. Water canister. A small stub pistol, the kind that looked like it would explode in the hand if fired twice.
She handed it to me.
"You should carry it."
I took the weapon. It felt like a toy in my hands. My fingers could crush it with barely a squeeze. But I nodded.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
She slung the satchel over her shoulder and looked out the door.
"Down."
I followed her out into the rising light, one hand on the pistol, the other resting at my side. My wounds had healed. My strength intact. I felt... anchored. Like every step I took hammered me more firmly into the world.
I had no armor. No army. No name that meant anything to these people. For now I needed to find refuge, somewhere to hide from the xenos that were looking for me.
We moved through the city in silence. The smog had begun to thin, rising in slow coils off cracked stone and shattered ferrocrete. I could hear the distant rumble of machines now, Denerikian patrols.
Our boots crunched over broken glass and splintered bone. Ariana kept a steady pace, but I saw the tension in her jaw. She was scared. She was trying not to show it.
She is a strong girl… she just lost her father.
We turned a corner into what had once been a marketplace. The stalls were long gone, collapsed into piles of junk and twisted steel. A single figure stood in the middle of the plaza.
Tall. Still.
Denerikian. But wrong.
His armor was dull and scorched, covered in filth and soot. His helm was gone, and his skin, what was left of it, seemed to shimmer and crawl under the light. His eyes were sunken, glowing faintly with a dull red pulse. He didn't reach for a weapon. He didn't speak.
He raised a hand.
And the world shifted.
It felt like my stomach dropped into the floor. The air thickened, pressed against my ears. My vision narrowed. A cold pressure pushed at the edges of my mind, like fingers scraping the inside of my skull.
Ariana gasped, staggered back. I stepped in front of her and drew the pistol. Useless. I knew it even as I raised it.
The figure began to chant.
I didn't understand the words, but they rang in my bones. Something deeper. A call. A summons.
Psychic energy lanced toward me, visible as a ripple in the air. I ducked, rolled forward, closed the distance.
I drove my fist into his chest.
Bone shattered. Armor cracked. He hissed, and blood sprayed from his mouth, dark, thick, and wrong. He snarled something guttural, then sent another blast of psychic force that hurled me back into a wall.
Pain bloomed through my shoulder, but I got up.
He came for me then. Fast. A blur of speed and hate. A blade in his hand now, crude, jagged, etched with symbols that pulsed like open wounds.
I caught his wrist mid-swing and drove my head into his face.
Cartilage snapped. He screamed.
I grabbed his throat, twisted, and slammed him into the ground.
He writhed beneath me, muttering foul syllables, and the air burned with the stink of ozone and rot. My vision blurred. My ears rang. My heart thundered.
I silenced him with one brutal blow.
His head came off in my hands.
The moment he died, the pressure vanished. The air cleared. The world felt... real again.
I stood over the corpse, breathing hard. Ariana approached cautiously, still holding her sidearm.
I looked down at the body.
His chestplate had split in the struggle, revealing the skin beneath. It was carved, no, branded, with symbols that made my vision swim. The edges of them seemed to move when I wasn't looking directly at them. Spikes. Eyes. Mouths. Loops that spiraled inward forever.
And four among them that I recognized.
Even without ever having seen them before, I knew what they were.
Chaos.
The Gods of the Warp. The Ruinous Powers.
Their marks burned in the flesh of this thing that had once been a soldier. My head throbbed just looking at them.
I landed in a conquered human world held by Xenos that worship chaos… great.
"We need to move," I said, my voice low.
Ariana looked at the corpse, then at me with wide blue eyes. "You killed a witch!"
She is kinda cute…
The city was awake now. We had moved on from the broken slums and into a more lived-in part of the city.
Gray light dripped from the sky like the world had forgotten how to shine. What passed for streets below us were a clogged network of metal walkways, plasteel stairs, and alleys choked with soot and static discharges. The smell was worse. Rotting garbage, recycled sewage, ozone and industrial runoff. Every few meters, a rusted vent hissed steam or smoke into the haze.
We moved fast. Ariana kept her hood up, head down, guiding us through half-collapsed corridors and narrow walkways where no one dared speak. Eyes followed us, sunken, hollow stares from half-starved humans lining the walls or huddling around scavenged heat-pylons.
I realized something as I watched them: there were a lot of us.
Not just a few survivors clinging to life. The entire lower city was packed with humanity, millions, maybe more, crammed into stacked warrens and buried levels. And every one of them moved with fear etched into their bones. Eyes never lingered. Backs were always turned.
Then I saw why.
A thrum of boots. Clattering claws. And that smell, something acidic, foreign.
A Derenik patrol emerged from a split-street two levels up, marching in formation with brutal efficiency. Half a dozen of them in blackened carapace armor, their reptilian bodies hunched and coiled like a predator halfway to the kill. Their eyes glowed a faint green behind lens-filters. One of them barked a command in its native tongue, clicks and growls and something metallic, and the rest responded in perfect sync.
Civilians scattered.
No one resisted. No one questioned. They didn't even look at them.
"Keep moving," Ariana whispered. "Don't make eye contact."
"They're not here for us," I muttered back.
She shot me a look. "That doesn't mean they won't kill you just because they feel like it, idiot."
The patrol descended the ramp ahead and moved past us without pause. I stood still, watching them. Their weapons weren't energy-based like the last ones. They were kinetic. Industrial. Brutal. Riot suppression turned into full-scale subjugation.
It hit me then.
We outnumbered them.
By a lot.
Yet we obeyed.
A ruling caste, alien in form and thought, holding dominion over a hive-world full of terrified, broken humans. I could see the design now, strategic cruelty, layered control, fear so deep it had become normal. Every glance. Every step. Every silence was a lesson carved into flesh.
And we let them.
I looked back at Ariana. She was already two meters ahead, slipping through a busted fence into a back alley that reeked of rust and mold.
"You coming, titan?" she hissed.
I followed, jaw tight.
She knew this city better than I knew my own mind. She moved like she'd been crawling through these shadows since birth. No hesitation. No second guesses. Every turn, every climb, every half-collapsed stairwell had a rhythm to it. She ducked under hanging wires, skipped over pools of chemical runoff, and never missed a handhold.
I matched her step for step.
After nearly thirty minutes of weaving through crumbling steel and concrete veins, we reached the foot of a high-rise. Not the glittering spires I'd glimpsed from the upper sky during my fall, those were much further from here, but one of the old mid-tier blocks. Fifty, maybe sixty floors of rusted girders and patchwork hab units, many long since abandoned.
"This is it," Ariana said, brushing damp hair from her face. "Block S-89."
She stepped inside through a maintenance hatch and led me into darkness. The stairwells were pitch black, the walls peeling and tagged with graffiti in three different languages. Derenik runes, human warnings, and something else, pictographs carved deep into the metal. Old and angry.
We climbed. Floor after floor. Ariana paused only to catch her breath around level thirty. I didn't need to. My lungs didn't burn. My legs didn't tire. But I kept pace with her, silently counting the steps.
At floor fifty, she stopped.
A door blocked our way. Real metal. Reinforced. She produced a narrow access key and a panel snatched from a nearby terminal, gutted tech.
She slid the panel into a slot, then jabbed the key into the side and twisted.
The door clicked. The lock gave.
The apartment beyond was small. Cramped. Filthy by any real standard. But much better than the city streets. Dust clung to the floor, and a single shattered holoscreen blinked on the wall. The furniture was old scrap nailed together, and the air stank of recycled oxygen. But it was shelter. And it seemed to have real appliances. Water, electricity.
At least I am not in some feudal shithole, now that would have been tough.
Ariana slumped into a corner, breathing hard. "This is my aunt's place. I don't think they ever tagged this place officially. We can stay here until the heat dies down."
"Thank you… I can't give anything back for all this help…"
"You saved my life… I am just repaying my debt to you!" She blushed while she spoke.
After the climb, the blood, and the fear, we finally had space to breathe. The room buzzed with faint electrical hums from old wall lines. A cracked solar plate struggled to power a dim bulb in the ceiling, flickering with every gust of wind through the shattered windows.
I sat cross-legged on the floor, elbows resting on my knees. The floor creaked beneath me.
Ariana paced in front of me like a caged animal, her hands twitching.
"You're not from here," she said. "Not just the city. Here here."
"No."
She stopped. "You fell from the sky."
"I did."
"Half a building exploded when you hit."
I nodded. "My pod, but yes."
"You killed a dozen Dereniks and a witch one like they were made of paper."
"Just fragile in the right spots." I said.
She stared at me, chewing her lip. Her eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks still streaked from dried tears. But she was trying to piece things together. Trying to understand. I admired that.
Then the questions came.
"Where did you come from? What are you? How are you so strong? Why are your eyes so blue?! How old are you?! What the hell are you?!What—"
I raised a hand, smiling gently. "Hey! Hey! Let's make this easier. A game. One question at a time. We take turns. You ask one. Then I ask one."
She blinked. "What?"
"I'll even let you go first."
She hesitated. Then: "Fine. What's your name?"
"Alexander." I leaned back against the wall. "My mother called me Alexander, no last name. Now mine: what's yours?"
I already knew it, but when she told me, she had been half in shock.
"Ariana," she replied. "Ariana Delos."
"Nice to meet you, Ariana."
She sat cross-legged across from me, still wary. "Okay. My turn. Where are you from?"
I paused. There was no point lying. Not to her.
"Terra."
She tilted her head. "Never heard of it."
"You wouldn't have," I said. "It's... far. Very far."
"What is it?"
"The cradle of humanity," I said softly. "Our homeworld. Where it all began."
She frowned. "I thought this was our homeworld."
I didn't blame her. Not really.
The Age of Strife had shattered more than just worlds. It had broken memory. Time itself had become fractured, history devoured by fire and silence. Across the stars, mankind had been scattered, reduced to warlords and tribes, each clutching at the remains of a past they no longer understood. Records were ash, libraries rubble, and the ones who still held knowledge either hoarded it like treasure or perverted it into cult and superstition.
After thousands of years of isolation, terror, and regression, most planets no longer remembered where they came from, only that the void was vast, cruel, and full of monsters.
Terra might as well have been a myth.
Even her name, Delos, hinted at a culture long decayed and repurposed. And Ariana herself, she wasn't some scholar or high-born. She moved like a scrapper. Spoke like someone who'd had to learn fast or die. Whatever education she had was fractured, probably oral, passed down in scraps. Like the rest of this crumbling galaxy.
I looked at her, young, defiant, half-starved, and still unbroken, and it struck me again just how far humanity had fallen. And how much further we might fall still.
"Your turn," she said quietly.
"Who are the aliens that rule this world?"
She looked up. "Dereniks. Reptilian bastards. Been here since before my grandfather was born. My mother used to say they came in ships the size of cities. Cracked the sky open and dropped soldiers into every major spire and district."
"How long ago?"
"About two hundred years. Maybe more. Records from before are mostly gone."
I nodded slowly. "And humanity?"
She shrugged. "What you've seen. We live in the lower levels, in the wastes, the slums. Some collaborate. Most scrape by. There's resistance... sort of. Whispers, rumors. But anyone caught gets... taken. No one comes back."
That lined up with what I'd seen. A conquered people, controlled by fear and brutality. Yet still breathing. Still present.
"Your turn again," I said.
She leaned forward. "What are you? You're not normal. You heal like nothing I've ever seen. You bent a solid alloy in half. Your voice makes walls shake."
"I am a human," I admitted. "But I was made, not born. Crafted by someone powerful."
She gave me a disbelieving look. "You're saying you're some kind of... experiment?"
"In a way," I said. "A weapon. A leader. A son."
She stared at me, silent. Her lips parted like she was about to speak, but nothing came out.
"Your turn again, I made more than one question." I prompted gently.
She blinked. "Right. Um... okay. Why are you here?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "I didn't choose to come. I was... sent. Or lost. Thrown through the void and spat out here."
"Like the legend of Apollion falling to the planet…" she muttered.
"Apollion?"
"The great Demigod hero that killed the gods!" She replied animatedly.
They have a legend of a demigod falling from the sky? Not suspicious at all…
Outside, something screamed in the distance, mechanical, bestial. A siren going through the seemingly infinite city.
"Is there anyone left fighting?" I asked. "Really fighting? Organized?"
She hesitated. "Maybe. There used to be cells, underground networks, saboteurs. My fa—father told me stories when I was little. They'd blow up convoys, hack Derenik comms, smuggle food and meds to the lower districts. But after the Burnings... most went dark."
"The Burnings?"
"When I was just five years old," she said. "The Dereniks executed ten billion people across six hives. They made everyone watch. Said it was punishment for a failed rebellion in another system. Since then, everyone's quiet. Even whispers feel dangerous."
Ten billion. The number echoed in my mind like a bell toll.
"I… need to take a bath, and so do you Alexander."
I was covered in Xeno blood and soot, so it was probably a good idea.
I had just finished patching the crack in the window with a strip of old polymer when the door slammed open with a bang that echoed through the walls like a gunshot.
Ariana jumped to her feet. I was already moving, muscles tensed, xeno rifle pointing at the door, halfway across the room before I even thought to act.
A woman burst through the doorway, wild-eyed and gasping, her blond hair tied in a loose knot and her long coat torn at the hem. She wore the look of someone who had been running through hell, because she had.
"Ariana!" she cried.
"Aunt Penelope!"
The two collided in a crushing embrace. Ariana wrapped her arms around the woman and clung to her like a lifeline. Penelope dropped to her knees, running her hands through Ariana's hair, pressing kisses to her forehead.
"I thought—I thought they had you," she whispered. "When I saw the patrols, the smoke—I heard that Mikael is dead..."
"I'm okay, they killed father…" Ariana said softly, her voice shaking. "I got away. I—he—he saved me."
That was when Penelope saw me.
She froze. Her eyes narrowed, scanning every inch of my face, my size, my eyes, the faint blood still staining my knuckles. Her body tensed like a spring coiled to snap.
"I'm not a threat to you," I said gently, lowering the gun onto the coffee table and raising my hands.
Ariana took her aunt's hand. "He's come from the sky. He killed the Dereniks."
Penelope's eyes snapped to her niece. "What?"
"He's not like us," Ariana said. "He's stronger. Faster. And he killed them all. A dozen of them. With his bare hands. I saw it. He even got a witch!"
Penelope turned back to me slowly. Her expression was unreadable, caught somewhere between awe and suspicion. For a long moment, Penelope said nothing. Then she stood, walked across the room, and extended her hand.
"I'm Penelope Delos," she said. "Ariana's aunt. Thank you for saving her. I mean that."
I took her hand. She had a strong grip, calloused and worn. A survivor's hand.
"Alexander," I said.
She nodded, looking me up and down. "You've got the build of a plow-hauler and the eyes of a Derenik warpriest, but if Ariana says you're a friend, that's good enough for me."
She stepped back and took off her coat, hanging it on a crooked nail by the door. Then she looked around the apartment with a tired sigh.
"This place looks better than usual."
"I reinforced the door," I said. "And patched the window."
Penelope blinked at me, then gave a crooked smile. "Well, that's already more useful than half the people I've let in here."
She crossed to the kitchen unit, a rusted alcove with an electric burner and a cracked water tank, and poured stale, filtered water into three cups.
"Sit down," she said. "If you're staying, then you eat with us."
"Staying?" I asked.
Penelope turned, offering me a cup. "You've got no place to go. You saved my niece. That makes you family as far as I'm concerned."
Ariana's eyes lit up. I felt something twist in my chest.
I took the cup, holding it in both hands. The water was lukewarm and slightly metallic, but I drank it gladly. It grounded me more than any battlefield ever had.
This was no throne room, no fortress, no parade of banners. Just a tired woman, a grieving girl, and the smell of old metal and burnt spice.
But here, in the heart of a broken world, I was being welcomed.
Accepted. These people had almost nothing and yet they gave me what little they had…
"Thank you," I said.
Penelope just waved it off. "Rest now. Tomorrow, you'll need to learn how to move without drawing attention. You're not exactly inconspicuous."
"I'll do what I must," I said.
She looked at me for a long second, then nodded. "Good. We could use someone like you at the factory; you certainly seem strong."
She looked at me and bit her lip.
Eh?!
Ariana just sighed, like she was used to this.
The apartment was quiet. Penelope had gone to her room hours ago, and Ariana had curled up on the thin mattress in the corner room, her breathing slow and soft behind a half-closed door.
I lay on the couch, its springs long dead and its frame groaning beneath my weight. I didn't sleep. I couldn't. I wasn't even tired.
Instead, I stared through the grime-frosted window, past the cracked plastic blinds, out into the city beyond.
And what a city it was.
Vast towers reached into the clouds like the fingers of dead gods. Whole districts were stacked one atop the other, glowing with layered webs of dying neon and flickering banners in languages I didn't know. Monorail tracks clung to superstructures like veins, while heavy-lift craft rumbled through the smog, their searchlights carving through the mist like blades of pale fire.
There was no Empress here, no Aquila carved into the walls. Just metal, smoke, and quiet despair. The skyline stretched out like a battlefield yet to be named.
I shifted slightly, the couch frame creaking beneath me. The Dereniks had ruled here for generations, according to Ariana. I could see their influence even now, military beacons pulsing from high towers, drone traffic zipping through restricted lanes, patrol barges scanning rooftops for the smallest breach in order.
And beneath it all, the people: the humans, crammed into mold-ridden hab-blocks, hiding from reptilian tyrants who saw them as little more than cattle.
Far beyond the city's edge, just barely visible through the haze of distance and smog, I saw them.
Spikes on the horizon. Monolithic, jagged, inhuman in scale. At first, I thought they were mountains. But they were too symmetrical, too precise. Their lines were harsh and deliberate, their forms alien in their immensity. They pierced the sky like blades aimed at the stars, taller than anything in the city around me.
Hive spires. They had to be.
Even from here, dozens, maybe hundreds of kilometers away, I could make them out in near-perfect detail. The sharp glint of glass and steel where the sun caught the highest tiers. The dark scars of exhaust vents and orbital lifts clinging to their lower halves like barnacles. Around their bases, even fainter, a storm of blinking lights, distant movement, endless vertical layers vanishing into the smog-choked void.
This planet must house hundreds of billions… How are they all fed?
I blinked. My vision didn't blur.
There were no imperfections anymore. No flicker, no strain. I could see further and sharper than any man should. The way one could study a grain of sand under a microscope, or watch the slow turn of a satellite from orbit.
It should have unnerved me, but it didn't.
It felt... right.
The way things should be.
I leaned back into the couch. It groaned again, but I barely heard it. My thoughts drifted.
What kind of power did it take to build something like that? Not just in terms of materials or labor, but belief. Conviction. The kind of ruthless, focused will that could shape continents and scar atmospheres.
What remained of those who built them?
The weight settled on my chest again.
Responsibility.
I had the body of a demigod, the mind of a tactician, and knowledge no one else on this planet could possibly have. I was born, grown, and shaped to change the fate of entire worlds. I knew it. I felt it in my blood.
But even so, this place felt alien. Not just because of the city or the Dereniks.
Because there was no path ahead. No legion. No Empress. No grand vision to follow. Just me.
I heard the door creak behind me, soft steps on the worn tile. I didn't turn.
Ariana shuffled into the room, her small form wrapped in a threadbare blanket. She looked barely awake, her hair a tangle of gold and shadow.
Wordlessly, she climbed onto the couch beside me, curling up at my side. Her head rested against my arm.
I turned to look at her. Her eyes were already closed, her breath soft. She didn't speak. Didn't ask permission. She simply trusted.
That hit harder than any plasma round ever could.
She had witnessed death. Seen her father murdered. Been hunted by monsters. And still—still—she reached for warmth in a world of cold metal.
I shifted slightly, wrapping one arm around her. She fit there perfectly, like she'd belonged there all along.
She murmured something I didn't catch, half a dream, then sank deeper into sleep.
I stayed still, watching the lights of the city ripple and fade in the polluted night. Somewhere out there, billions of humans toiled eternally, oppressed by a Xenos regime.
And I was here, cradling a girl that couldn't be older than nineteen, trying to understand what kind of future I was meant to build.
Not a destroyer. Not just a weapon.
I would be more.
I would be hope.
My soul reached out. My eyes glowed.
Ariana sighed in her sleep, the tiniest smile tugging at her lips.
I let my eyes drift close. There was no map for what came next. No orders from above. No star to follow.
Just this world.
This girl.
And the blood that burned in my veins and was pumped by my two hearts.
-END-
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