01.50 - Assassin from Another World

Going the whole distance with regular propulsion was infeasible. The acceleration for the first half alone would take about a year, and steering at a sufficient rate near the speed of light was a bad idea not worth further pursuing. Space was vast, and below light speed travel was a drag to say the least.

Instead, the initial acceleration brought me up to a steady, but still manageable speed. The whole asteroid made a short superluminal jump, near enough to reach the target, but far enough not to be immediately spotted, and still allowing me to hone in and make slight course corrections.

The jump itself went well, but one of their monitoring probes noticed the new object near it, leading to a barrage and multiple interception attempts by the enemy base and its fleet.

The shield batteries alone would not have seen me through the whole ordeal.

Luckily, the capacity of my own Energy pool was tied to my Special Power, which was in the five digits by now, and therefore beyond ridiculous at this point.

Maybe I could have taken out the base by myself at this point, but that would make me appear a bit too competent, and a possible threat to my ‘father’ and his ‘allies’.

Better to appear like a mere mortal with a taste for thrill, a sense for the ridiculous and more luck than sense. Those kinds of people could be useful. For a while. There was no doubt in my mind that we would clash eventually. Maybe my father didn’t destroy whole planets, but I’d bet he had done enough to earn his own downfall. Without even counting his ‘lovelife’.

The tiny point of light that was the source of the assault on my unit’s shields and that slowly but surely nibbled away at the surface of the asteroid, began to slowly get bigger.

Time for a last adjustment.

Then my unit separated from the lump of metal hurtling toward the enemy base.

My unit almost collided with a ship floating near the base as the impact pushed my still highly accelerated unit further from its regular trajectory.

Making contact with a crew to pick me up could have been a problem, but I had enough Energy reserves, and could survive space in my transformed dragon form.

To my own surprise, most of the enemy forces left on the ground surrendered without much of a fight, after their orbital base had shone like a second sun hours ago.

We made a lot of prisoners, with minimal losses on our own side.

Legends were written that day.

So were nicknames.

‘Sun Maker’, ‘Grey Reaper’, ‘The Ashen Vanguard.’

That last one stuck.

I remembered Daivd’s words: “Whether you win or run, no one will know, and if you fall, you’ll be forgotten.”

Well, not even his network of spies could have suppressed that news without murdering all those prisoners of war before the next exchange.

—

Their own last battle was a success too, not least because of our enemies rapidly declining ability to support their frontline troops.

They too had taken quite a few prisoners after their last battle, some quite high ranking. The same was true for us, as the commander of the supply base had not decided to go down with it.

It took quite some convincing to finally get David to spill the beans.

There was an initially small, but steadily growing rebellion in the enemy camp.

They provided David’s spy network with intel and did some sabotage.

So far, so good, but they lacked manpower, drive, and, most importantly, arms, to stage a full on revolt.

Did we plan to give them what they needed?

Nope.

But they could be used to quickly fill the power vacuum and take the credit.

For what you ask?

For the regicide we planned, prepared for, and would execute soon enough.

The basic plan was simple enough: Tia and I would shapeshift into the enemy commander and his right hand man, we had taken hostage.

We would make use of a prisoner exchange to infiltrate the upper echelons of the enemy and take out their leader.

At the same time, Lucy would hide with the other refugees, make contact with the rebels, and prepare them to take credit for our actions and take over amidst the chaos we would cause.

The exchange went as planned.

It was smooth sailing all the way, at least for now.

We followed the guards and entered Seth’s command room.

I say room, but it was more of a great hall with a giant dome at the ceiling.

Then everything started to go south.

Seth was tall.

Tall tall.

At least two heads bigger than Kentaro, with long black hair, almost colored like a void, seeming to absorb whatever light tried to escape it.

He barely looked at the transformed Tia and me before he spoke up:

“And who the hell are you?”