The multi-directional grid of crimson light cast by Gunz's ricocheting plasma beams illuminated the battlefield in violent, flashing hues. The hyper-pressurized steam explosion Zainab had unleashed momentarily disrupted his perimeter, but the Elite was far from finished. Blistered, his skin smoking from the intense thermal shock, Gunz flipped backward through the air, landing lightly on the wreckage of a collapsed cargo crane.
"Impresive," Gunz hissed, his elegant voice cracked with a rare hint of genuine anger. He raised both hands, pulling them back into a double-gun posture. "But it's not enough to stop me!"
BEAM! BEAM! BEAM!
Gunz's fingers flashed like a machine gun. He didn't just fire single shots anymore; he unleashed continuous, concentrated torrents of energy beam that sliced through the ground and melted irons
"Temi, keep moving! Don't the beams hit you!" Zainab shouted.
Zainab didn't dare drop back into her solid state. She slid across the battlefield as a rushing, serpentine wave of water, dodging the lances of light by mere inches. Every time a beam clipped her fluid form, the water superheated, boiling away her volume.
Temi sprinted along the upper ridge of the ruined transport ship, her boots skidding against the loose rivets, She formed a massive, rotating vortex of water above her head, shaping it into an hyper dense shield to intercept a stray beam aimed at her captain.
CRACK!
The plasma beam drilled into Temi's water shield.
The beam moved so fast it passed through he's shield, the shockwave blasted Temi off the platform. She fell ten feet, landing hard against a broken support beam. She gasped, her vision blurring as her left arm went entirely numb from the residual electricity of the blast.
"Temi!" Zainab's voice echoed from the fluid mass.
Seeing her subordinate down, Zainab pulled her scattered water form back together, materializing right in front of Gunz's vantage point.
"Hey, flashy piece of shit," Zainab coughed, a thin trail of blood running from her lip. "Look over here."
Gunz sneered, dropping his aim cleanly onto her forehead. "Die, human."
Before his fingers could spark, Zainab slammed both hands onto the scorched metal deck. She didn't throw water at him. Instead, she destroyed the ground beneath he's boot, causing he to loose balance and fall, Zainab looked back at Temi with absolute desperation. "Now, Temi! Use everything! Don't let him breathe!"
Temi Nova looked up, her eyes wide with a sudden, unyielding determination.
"Go to hell!" Temi screamed.
Temi directed all her remaining Evo-energy into the flooded trenches created by the melted steel. A colossal, roaring wave of thick, muddy, debris-filled water rose from the floor like the jaws of a leviathan. It didn't just strike Gunz; it enveloped him entirely.
Gunz sputtered, attempting to raise his hands to fire a laser that could vaporize his way out, but Temi didn't give him a single microsecond. She tightly clenched her fists, compacting the massive sphere of water, increasing its density until it carried the weight of an ocean trench. The immense fluid pressure locked his limbs down, trapping his hands against his sides.
Gunz's eyes widened in sheer panic behind his visor as the water forced its way into his respiratory system.
liquid filled his lungs, drowning out his plasma spark entirely. With a final, muted bubble of air escaping his lips, the Elite's eyes rolled back, his body going completely limp inside the water tomb.
The sphere popped, dropping Gunz's unconscious body heavily into the mud.
Temi fell backward, her eyes rolling into her head as she collapsed from absolute exhaustion.
Beside her, Zainab dropped to her knees, her body trembling violently, unable to even summon a single droplet of water, Their energy was completely spent.
Meanwhile
The dragon Elite, having recovered from Kealen's fire blast, soared high above the fractured hull of the dreadnought. His massive, obsidian-scaled wings beat against the air currents, creating miniature sonic booms with every snap.
"Wretched insects!" Dragon roared, his dual vocal cords vibrating with terrifying power. "You will all be burnt to death".
The dragon opened his colossal jaws. Deep within his gullet, a blinding, swirling vortex of compressed energy began to manifest, turning his entire throat into a glowing furnace of pure destruction.
"Move! Move! Move!" Rook screamed.
Rook threw himself forward, slamming both of his blood-stained palms onto the deck plates, he rose a massive, fifty-foot sections of the dreadnought's armored hull clean out of the framework. He layered them one over the other, creating a towering, multi-tiered dome of reinforced titanium-steel directly over himself, Jaxen, and Kealen.
BOOOOOOM!
The dragon unleashed the blast from his mouth. It wasn't a standard stream of fire; it was a solid, continuous torrent of superheated plasma that hit Rook's metal dome with the force of a falling meteor.
Inside the dome, the air instantly turned suffocatingly hot. The outer layers of the titanium shield didn't just turn red—they began to actively liquefy, melting away like wax under a blowtorch. The immense concussive pressure forced Rook to drop into a deep stance, his boots tearing through the floorboards as he fought against the downward force.
"I knew it!" Jaxen yelled over the deafening roar of the plasma, blue arcs of electricity actively crackling across his hair. "I told you guys dragons were aliens! That means every single fairytale story our parents told us when we were kids is actually just alien stories!"
"Seriously, Jaxen?! Right now?! We are literally about to die, and you're talking about bedtime stories?!" Kealen said,as he pointed towards Jaxen
"Just admit you're wrong and I'm right!" Jaxen grinned wildly, . "Admit the fairytale logic makes perfect sense!"
"Oh my days, fine! You were right! Dragons are aliens! Happy now?!" Kealen roared, wiping sweat and soot from his forehead as the ceiling above them began to sag and drip molten iron.
"Yo! You two done yapping?!" Rook shouted, his voice cracking from the absolute agony of holding the defense. His arms were shaking so violently that his fingernails were beginning to split and bleed under the strain. "I can't... hold this... anymore!"
CRACK!
The dragon's continuous plasma blast finally burned through the last structural layer of Rook's titanium dome. The shield disintegrated into a shower of white-hot slag.
"Scatter!" Jaxen yelled.
Using his lightning-step velocity, Jaxen grabbed both Rook and Kealen by their collars, transforming into a jagged streak of blue electricity that zipped out of the blast radius a millisecond before the plasma stream pulverized the ground where they had been standing. The resulting explosion created a massive, towering cloud of thick black smoke and ash that completely blanketed the entire area, creating a smoke screen.
Inside the dense smoke screen, the three fighters skittered to a halt behind a piece of broken machinery. Rook collapsed against the steel, gasping for breath, his hands raw and blistered.
Jaxen stood tall, a confident, cocky smile spreading across his face , He cracked his knuckles ,"Okay," Jaxen whispered, his eyes locking onto the massive shadow of the dragon circling within the smoke above. "Leave the dragon to me."
Before Kealen could argue, Jaxen exploded out of the hiding spot, sprinting directly toward the clearing where the massive beast was landing.
"Looks like I'm going to kill a dragon!" Jaxen yelled, launching himself off a piece of debris straight toward the monster's snout.
Meanwhile, deeper within the thick, billowing smoke screen, Rook and Kealen remained low, their eyes scanning the terrain. Across the clearing, the two monstrous soldiers, Raze the Absorber and Blaze the Redirector, were slowly advancing, their heavy boots thudding against the metal deck as they searched for the survivors.
"Ok, how can we beat these guys?" Kealen asked, his voice low as he recharged a small, concentrated flame in his palm. "If I attack they just absorb it ".
"We overload the absorber," Rook said, his voice grim as he wrapped his bleeding hands in strips of cloth torn from his uniform.
Kealen frowned, looking down at his flickering flames. "Overload? Will it work? Can it even work? He looked like a literal tank out there."
"Remember when you were blasting those fireballs earlier?" Rook pointed out, "He couldn't handle it smoothly toward the end. His body changed because it reached its absolute limit. That's why there was that intense orange glow under his skin. His cellular structure can store energy, but it has a specific capacity. If we exceed that capacity, the container breaks."
Kealen's eyes lit up with sudden realization. "I see. If I feed him more fire than his body can handle, he won't be able to pass it to Blaze without burning himself from the inside out."
"Exactly," Rook muttered, pulling himself up onto his feet. "I'll create the opening to separate Blaze. Once they can't touch each other to transfer the loop, you can burn em up."
Outside the smoke, the battle erupted into total chaos. Jaxen was currently engaged in a spectacular, high-speed aerial duel with The dragon.
The dragon snapped his jaws, tail whipping through the air like a wrecking ball, but Jaxen was a phantom of blue light. He bounced off the dragon's wings, driving lighting-infused blade strikes into the gaps between the obsidian scales.
However, drag..on scale density was immense. Frustrated by the fly buzzing around his head, the dragon opened his massive maw wide, executing a massive, wide-range inhalation that created a vacuum pull within the clearing. Jaxen, caught mid-air without a platform to jump from, was sucked directly into the vortex of the dragon's mouth.
CHOMP.
Dragon slammed his jaws shut, swallowing Jaxen whole. The dragon let out a deep, vibrating rumble of satisfaction.
"Jaxen!" Kealen screamed from the smoke.
"Focus on our target!" Rook roared.
Rook didn't waste a single heartbeat. He slammed his hands down, he ripped up the floorboards directly beneath Blaze's boots. A massive, jagged spire of iron shot upward, launching Blaze fifty feet away from his partner, cutting off their physical contact line.
"Now, Kealen! Burn him down!" Rook yelled.
Kealen leaped over the wreckage, his eyes burning with absolute fury. He didn't fire standard fireballs this time. He extended both arms opening his palms , A massive, continuous, blinding beam of -hot flames erupted from his hands, striking Raze directly in the chest.
Raze chuckled, opening his arms wide to absorb the strike. "Foolish child! I'm just gonna absorb it".
The blue and orange veins beneath Raze's skin flared to life instantly. He began to expand, his muscles swelling as he absorbed the flames, But Kealen didn't stop.
He stepped forward, pouring even more flames,
He's clothes began to burn from the intense heat.
Raze's cocky smile began to falter. The orange glow beneath his skin turned into a violent, burning crimson. The heat within his own body was rising too fast; without Blaze there to touch him and siphon the energy out, his internal organs were beginning to cook.
"Stop... Stop it!" Raze screamed, his skin beginning to crack like dried earth, tiny streams of raw, uncontained fire leaking from his pores.
"You wanted the fire?!" Kealen roared, his own arms blistering from the feedback of his output. "TAKE ALL OF IT!"
With a final, desperate roar, Kealen unleashed an absolute solar flare of energy. The capacity limit of Raze's absorption was obliterated. The absorber's body couldn't contain the atomic pressure anymore. With a deafening BOOM, Raze exploded from the inside out, a massive shockwave of displaced thermal energy blasting across the quadrant, knocking Blaze unconscious against the wreckage. Kealen dropped to his knees, his hands smoking, completely spent but victorious.
At that exact moment, the dragon suddenly froze mid-stride. His massive, obsidian-scaled stomach began to glow with a bright, erratic blue light.
Inside the dark, caustic depths of the dragon's stomach, Jaxen was completely unbothered by the digestive acids. He had a massive, manic grin on his face as he gathered every single remaining drop of his lightning manipulation into his core, spinning his blades in a circle.
"Time for the special recipe," Jaxen laughed. "STATIC OVERLOAD!"
An absolute cataclysm of high-frequency electrical voltage detonated inside the dragon's internal organs. Millions of volts of blue lightning bounced violently off the interior walls of the beast's digestive tract, searching for the absolute path of least resistance to escape the pressurized container.
BOOM!
With an incredibly loud, concussive, and deeply embarrassing detonation, Jaxen was violently launched out of the stomach like a human cannonball, covered in soot, ash, and questionable biological residue. He skidded across the metal deck on his stomach, tumbling twenty feet before rolling onto his back, completely out of breath but laughing hysterically.
Behind him, the dragon eyes rolled back into his head, smoke actively pluming from his mouth and ears as his entire nervous system completely fried from inside.
The massive beast crashed heavily onto its side, completely neutralized.
But Jaxen, kealen and rook where at the mercy of the incoming soilders.