Chương 260: Chapter 259 - Space Wizard Police

Alexander was already moving before the first volley lit up the sky. The turrets fired in sequence, staggered bursts of colored light that carved lines through the air where he'd been a half-second before. He juked hard, Metallokinesis pulsing, the OACS rattling around him as he threw himself between the beams. Something was wrong. His senses swept over the ship and failed to penetrate. The ship was enormous. Twice the length of the Sleipnir, easily, its hull stretching across the sky above the burning forest.

The broadside was almost entirely turrets. Massive housings, each one large enough to swallow his old apartment, mounted in rows that ran the full length of the ship. Dozens of them. The space they consumed was staggering, but the armor between them was thin. Barely enough to hold the ship together. He'd expected lasers or grasers, beams moving at the speed of light, where the only hope of evasion came from beating the targeting system before it fired. These weren't that. He'd already dodged dozens of shots.

The thing had no teeth. No real guns. No railgun housings. No torpedo bays. No point defense clusters. Just slow turrets firing light that wasn't moving as fast as it should be. The Sleipnir would gut this ship in a single exchange. Half its size, part luxury yacht, and it would tear through the hull plating from half a solar system away while easily outmaneuvering any return fire. So why build it? A beam hit his left leg. Just the edge of the meter-wide column of light. He braced for pain. Nothing came. No heat.

No force. Alexander glanced down. An ethereal chain trailed from his ankle, luminous and translucent, stretching upward in a long arc toward the turret that had fired it. It began reeling him in. Gently. Persistently. Like a fisherman testing if the hook was in. A second beam clipped him. He twisted at the last moment, but the beam was too wide. The distraction had slowed him. It swallowed his arm up to the elbow before he tore free. Another chain materialized, locking into place, its pull joining the first.

A third beam engulfed him from the waist up. Every muscle in his body seized. Paralysis pulsed through his nervous system, bypassing the suit, reaching directly into his body. The combined drag shifted his trajectory toward the ship ever so slightly as Metallokinesis fought to continue straight. A fourth beam hit his back. His vision dimmed. Fatigue crashed over him. His eyelids were suddenly heavy, working to close. His thoughts slowed. Dulled. Alexander rerouted Electrokinesis.

Away from the pair of OACS vambraces and his cybernetic arm, capacitors steadily recharging, none of them yet full. He poured power into his Core, held it, let it build. Then he released it. Raw current tore across his body. Flooded his nervous system. Through muscle fibers and tendons and everywhere the magic had wormed its way into. It hurt. In a good way. The paralysis shattered. The fatigue burned away. His vision snapped back into focus. His thoughts sharpened. Nobody fucked with his mind.

Alexander stopped maneuvering parallel to the ship. He angled his next evasion upward and toward it, letting the chains' pull add to his acceleration rather than fighting it. Flashpoint blazed against the sky off to the right, close enough to continue their fight. Fire consumed three of the chains attached to his body, the ethereal links burning away under the heat. But a fourth, thicker than the others, was wrapped around his throat.

It glowed a deep violet, and every new beam that hit him seemed to pulse through the others and feed into it, reinforcing it. Flashpoint could wait. A hatch slid open near the ship's prow. Two dozen figures in robes stood in the opening, wind tearing at their clothes. They launched themselves from the ship one after another, falling into the open air. Tier 1 signatures flared in his awareness as they dropped below the ship's protective enchantments. Flashpoint looked at Alexander. Alexander looked at Flashpoint.

Fire erupted beneath Flashpoint's feet and he tore across the sky toward the falling wizards. Alexander gritted his teeth. He hated that they'd reached the same conclusion. Hated that it was the right one even more. A beam of pink light struck him head on. He didn't try to dodge. Another chain latched on. Three now. The pull toward the ship strengthened. He went with it. A second turret tracked him. It glowed with a different color. He recognized the signature of the exhaustion spell and threw himself sideways.

It missed by an inch. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. More turrets rotated toward him. Too late. The hull filled his vision. He relaxed his control. His Domain bloomed into existence again, even easier than previous attempts. The drain tugged at his soul, but power answered his need. The end of the closest turret slipped into range. The one that first chained him. And then Metallokinesis was inside the metal, bypassing the ship's magical protections.

Power reached down its length all the way to the base where the housing jutted from the side of the ship like a squat block. Alexander rotated. Reached out a hand and pulled. Metal screamed as the turret's base began to tear free. Magic pushed back against him, woven into every joint and weld. Animachina responded, flowing across his Domain, merging with Metallokinesis. He didn't know why, but it helped. Rivets sheared. Welds split.

The housing groaned, tilted, and ripped away from the hull in a shriek of rending alloy. The chain attached to his ankle dissolved the instant the turret lost contact with the ship. Alexander hurled the turret across the broadside. It tumbled end over end, smashed through a closer turret housing that was tracking him, and slammed into the one anchoring his second chain. The impact crumpled both housings into the hull. The second chain flickered and vanished. One chain remaining.

But his attention had already shifted. Where the first turret had been, a room lay open to the sky. The hull's interior gaped like a wound, cross-sections of decking and bulkhead exposed. Five figures lay in white marble pods arranged in a semicircle, their bodies reclined, eyes closed. Tubing that had connected them to the turret's base flapped in the wind, severed ends leaking a faint luminescence that scattered as it met air. They were powering the turret's mechanism directly.

Shaping the spells, focusing them, and firing them. Living batteries wired into a weapon platform. Alexander's senses flooded through the breach. The magic resisted along the surface, but once inside, once past the outer ward layer, the ship revealed itself to him. Technopathy found nothing. Not a circuit. Not a processor. Not a single wire or power conduit in the entire vessel. The ship was as dead to Technopathy as the fortress had been. But Electrokinesis painted a different picture.

Hundreds of bioelectric signatures pulsed through the ship's interior. Every turret room held three to five crew in pods. There were more in what he assumed were command sections near the prow. Every single one had a metal wand. Every single signature registered as Tier 1. Alexander hung there, wind tearing at the OACS, one chain still pulling at him, and reassessed. It wasn't a warship. It was a capture vessel. It might not even be a military vessel in the way he understood the term.

It was more like a massive patrol ship. The wizard world's equivalent of a coast guard cutter sent to check on a disturbance. Space wizard police. Perhaps drawn by the death of the garrison. Maybe from Flashpoint's wholesale slaughter of a nearby village. Or both. It didn't matter. The ship was a problem to his plan to murder Flashpoint, claim the gateway, and escape before something worse came after him. Alexander grabbed the last chain with both hands. The cybernetic arm's capacitors weren't full.

Neither were the suit's. But he dumped what they had. Electrokinesis erupted from both palms, current pouring into the ethereal link. The magic resisted. Held for a fraction of a second. Then shattered, fragments of pink light scattering in the wind. He raced into the breach. The ship's interior opened around him. Metal corridors, metal walls, metal floors. Every surface answering his Domain the moment he passed the outer ward layer.

His Metallokinesis ran ahead of him, mapping the ship's structure faster than his eyes could track. The walls tore open before he reached them. Bulkheads peeled apart, splitting along seams and welds, folding outward as his Domain ripped a path through the ship's guts. Rooms flashed past on either side. Turret stations with crews still in their pods, eyes closed, oblivious. Storerooms packed with crates and barrels. Corridors lined with doors. A wizard stumbled into his path from a side passage. Wand half-raised.

Mouth opening. Alexander hit him with his shoulder at speed. The wizard folded from the impact and bounced off the far wall. He didn't slow down. Two more appeared ahead, wands drawn, runes already forming. Metallokinesis seized both wands and crushed them in their owners' hands. The wizards screamed. Alexander blew past before the sound faded. He was hunting. Somewhere in this ship was a power source. Not a reactor. Not a fusion cell. Whatever the magical equivalent was.

Something that kept hundreds of tons of metal hanging in the sky. Something that powered the ward layer, the flight systems. It had to exist. Nothing flew without energy, regardless of whether that energy came from physics or magic. His senses swept ahead, following the densest concentration of metal, the thickest structural supports, the corridors that widened instead of narrowed. Engineering was always protected. Always the most reinforced part of the ship. He tore through two more walls and found it.

A round chamber at the ship's core. Dozens of pods lined the curved walls, stacked three high, each one occupied. The wizards inside were still, eyes closed, hands folded over their chests. Thick tubes ran from every pod toward the center of the room, converging on a single point. A staff. It rested in a cradle of dark metal, an intricate framework of interlocking rings that held it suspended at chest height.

Light streamed along its length in both directions, racing from base to tip and back again in pulses that matched the ship's hum. The staff itself was unlike Keda's. The wood was ancient. Dark grain twisted along its length in patterns that looked grown rather than carved. At its head, an uncut red gemstone the size of his fist sat cradled in the wood itself. The wood wrapped around the stone the way roots wrap around a boulder, gripping it from every angle.

The gem pulsed with a deep light that shifted and breathed. A spellbook hovered two feet in front of the staff, open near its center. Its pages were still. The heart of the ship. Alexander stole it. For some reason, they were unprotected compared to the rest of the ship. His Will reached out, wrapped around both objects, and a single thought stored them inside his ring. The ship shuddered. And fell. Alexander floated there.

The decks above him peeled open as the vessel dropped around him, refusing to take him with it. He felt bioelectrical signatures spike all across the ship. People stumbled. Screams rang out. Hull plating parted above his head, and suddenly he was back in the open sky. Droney and the swarm had finally caught up, spreading out in every direction around where the ship had been. Beneath him, the ship dropped away, hundreds of signatures falling with it. Alexander watched it race toward the ground.

A few hundred meters away, Flashpoint hung in the air. He had a wizard by the throat. The man's legs kicked. His hands clawed at the armored fingers around his neck. Robes flapped in the wind. Flashpoint met Alexander's gaze. Fire erupted between his fingers. The wizard's head disappeared inside a ball of white flame. The legs stopped kicking. The hands dropped. Flashpoint held the corpse for a moment longer. Then he opened his fingers and let it fall after the ship.