Novels by Fuyingwen

The inside of the "Pangolin" smelled of old grease, stale tobacco, and pure, unfiltered testosterone.It was cramped. The cabin was designed for two operators, not six.Dad was in the pilot's seat, his hands gripping the dual control levers. Mom was squeezed into the co-pilot seat, clutching her purse like it was a lifeline.The rest of us—me, Ben, Haley, Valerius, and Marcus—were crammed into the small cargo space behind the seats. It was intimate, in the worst possible way."Get your elbow out of my spleen, wolf-boy," Ben Carter grumbled, trying to protect his briefcase from being crushed by Valerius's knee."Touch me again, accountant, and you lose the hand," Valerius snarled, his eyes glowing yellow in the dim cabin light. He was hunched over, his massive frame taking up half the space. He looked like a tiger stuffed into a cat carrier."Quiet back there!" Dad shouted. He pulled a pair of cracked aviator goggles from the dashboard and pu

The sky wasn’t falling. It was being liquidated.If you’ve never stood beneath a rain of burning, multi-million dollar military hardware, I don’t recommend it. It smells like burning plastic and ozone, and it sounds like a thousand cash registers being thrown down a flight of stairs."Incoming! Twelve o'clock!" Marcus roared, shoving his heavy tower shield upward.CRASH.A flaming chunk of a "Valkyrie" drone, sleek silver chrome now twisted into a blackened pretzel, slammed into the energy shield. The impact sent a shockwave through the debris-strewn platform, rattling my teeth."That was a Mark-IV Guidance Module!" Ben Carter shrieked, scrambling on all fours under a slab of concrete. He wasn't hiding from the shrapnel; he was trying to scan the QR code on a piece of smoking debris with his wrist-comp. "That component alone is worth forty-five thousand credits before tax! Don't step on it! You're stepping on my year-end bonus!""Ben,

The sky to the south tore open.It wasn't a metaphor. The clouds were literally sheared apart by the sonic boom of something moving at Mach 5."Incoming bogeys!" Marcus yelled, tracking the radar on his HUD. "Multiple contacts! Fifty... no, a hundred! They're moving too fast for standard propulsion!"Silver streaks painted the sky. They weren't missiles. They were drones. But not the cheap, plastic quadcopters the Council used for surveillance. These were "Valkyrie" models—sleek, chrome-plated killers with swept-forward wings and engines that burned with a clean, white flame.They didn't attack us. They swarmed beneath the falling bombardment rounds.The Fenrir's Fang fired its first volley—massive tungsten rods designed to punch through bunkers.The Valkyries intercepted them.It was like watching a ballet of violent mathematics. Three drones would converge on a falling rod, fire high-intensity gravity-tethers to alter its trajectory,

The sound wasn't an explosion. Explosions are quick. This was a grinding, agonizing scream of geology being murdered.The ceiling of the underground city—a layer of permafrost and reinforced concrete that had held for a thousand years—didn't just crack. It was excised.A circle of ice, easily a mile wide, began to rotate."Drilling lasers," Marcus roared over the deafening noise, shielding his eyes from the sudden cascade of ice dust and debris falling like snow. "High-intensity thermal bores! They're cutting the lid off the jar!""My parents!" I lunged toward them, shielding them with my body as a chunk of frozen rock the size of a Honda Civic smashed into the walkway ten feet away, obliterating a row of empty cryo-pods."Up!" Haley pointed, her voice shrieking an octave higher than usual. "Look up!"The mile-wide disc of ice was lifted away by invisible hands, vanishing into the twilight sky above. In its place descended a shadow that blot

The final chamber was not cold. It was warm.It was designed to mimic a womb. Soft, amber light pulsed from the walls. The air was humid and smelled of nutrient fluid and ozone.In the center of the room, on a raised dais, stood two vertical pods. They were pristine, untouched by the decay that plagued the rest of the city.One was labeled Subject Zero-Pater.The other, Subject Zero-Mater.I stopped at the foot of the dais. My legs felt like lead. This was it. The reason I had fought through the frozen hell, the reason I had endured the Entropy Curse, the reason I had become a monster."Jack?" Haley whispered. She hung back near the door, sensing the intimacy of the moment. Even Ben stopped typing on his calculator."It's them," I whispered.I walked up the steps. I looked into the first pod.My father. The real one. Not the hologram. He looked younger than I remembered, his face unlined by the stress of the years he had missed. He floate

The air in the Cryogenic Storage facility was so cold it didn't just bite; it chewed. It was a sterile, absolute zero that froze the sweat on our skin instantly, turning our fatigue into a shivering, brittle exhaustion."It's quiet," Haley whispered, her breath puffing out in white clouds. "Too quiet. Like a library after hours.""It's a tomb," Valerius corrected, his voice echoing slightly in the vast, cylindrical chamber. "A very expensive tomb."We walked down a central gangway suspended over a dark abyss. On either side, stretching up into the gloom like books on a shelf, were hundreds of cryo-pods. Most were dark, their occupants long dead due to power failure. But here and there, amber status lights blinked, signaling life in stasis.I checked the Ouroboros Compass. The needle was spinning lazily, confused by the magnetic interference of so much dormant machinery, but it generally pointed toward the far end of the catwalk."Jack," Marcus called out, st