LOGINThe battlefield was a nightmare of toxic slurry and twisted metal.I stood in the center of it, my environmental suit already degrading at the seams, the acid rain hissing against my skin. My royal core was a hollow, aching void. My body was screaming. Every breath was a chore.But the rain kept falling.The dome was gone. The shield was shattered. And the acid rain was pouring down on three hundred people who were huddled inside the fortress, waiting for the walls to dissolve around them."Lyra, we need to get back inside," Kael said, his arm wrapping around my waist, supporting my weight. "Your suit's integrity is dropping. You're burning up.""I can feel it," I rasped, my vision swimming. "The acid. It's eating through the outer barracks. The greenhouse is gone. The water treatment system is compromised."Through the bond, I felt his fear—a cold, sharp thing that cut through the exhaustion. He was watching my suit degrade, watching the chemical burns starting to form on my skin, watc
The inversion felt like turning my own skeleton inside out.I slammed both palms onto the ignition rod, not with royal energy—my core was too hollow for that—but with pure, brute intent. I visualized the dome not as a shield, but as a mirror. Not a filter, but a wall. Reflect.The silver membrane above us didn't just shimmer. It screamed. The polarity flipped with a sound like a thousand tuning forks struck at once, the lunar energy reversing its flow, turning outward instead of inward. The next artillery shell hit the dome at Mach two.It didn't detonate. It bounced.The kinetic force rebounded up the exact trajectory it had come from, a blinding silver streak that arced back toward the ridge. It struck the nearest M777 howitzer square in the breech.The explosion was spectacular. A massive fireball of orange and grey bloomed on the ridge, the howitzer disintegrating into a shower of twisted metal. The shockwave knocked two more artillery crews off their feet."Direct hit!" Rook's vo
We were halfway back to the med-bay when the floor tried to eat us.It wasn’t a shake. It was a concussive, chest-rattling thud that threw me hard against Kael’s side. The lights in the corridor flickered, died, and were instantly replaced by the bloody crimson of the emergency backups. A second later, the second impact hit. THUD.Dust rained from the concrete ceiling. The sound that followed wasn't the roar of a beast or the hiss of acid. It was a deep, rolling boom that echoed across the frozen wasteland, followed by the high-pitched, tearing shriek of the atmosphere being ripped apart."Artillery," Kael snarled, his arm locking around my waist to keep me upright. The playful, lethal Alpha who had just interrogated a spy vanished, replaced instantly by the Exiled King going to war. "They’re using heavy artillery."We didn't walk. We sprinted. By the time we burst into the command center, Mira and Rook were already at the consoles. The holographic table was a chaotic mess of red warn
The deep cells were exactly what they sounded like: a concrete box buried three levels beneath the fortress, where the only sounds were the drip of condensation and the distant, muffled hiss of acid rain against the dome above.I shouldn't have been there. Mira had explicitly ordered me to stay in bed for another forty-eight hours, and Kael had backed her up with that low, gravelly tone that usually meant he was about to carry me somewhere against my will. But when he told me Julian was ready to talk, I'd swung my legs off the bed, grabbed my tactical pants, and said, "Either you help me walk, or I Shadow Step down there and you can explain to Mira why I tore my stitches."He'd sighed, the long-suffering sound of a man who had long ago accepted that logic had no power over me, and offered his arm.Now I was sitting in a steel chair across from Julian, wrapped in Kael's tactical cloak because my own body heat was still struggling to regulate. My royal core was a hollow, aching void,
The med-bay smelled like antiseptic, ozone, and the faint, metallic tang of my own depleted blood. I was propped up on a pile of pillows, an IV dripping nutrient-rich fluids into my arm. My royal core felt like a hollowed-out gourd stuffed with broken glass. Every breath was a chore. Every heartbeat was a reminder of how close I had come to burning out completely.But I was alive. And the dome was holding.Kael stood at the foot of the bed, strapping a tactical thigh holster over his black cargo pants. He was in full combat gear, but he’d added a heavy, sealed environmental cloak over it. The acid rain was still hissing against the dome outside, and if the shield flickered again, he needed to be protected. He looked terrifying. The Exiled Alpha King had returned, and he was looking for blood."You don't have to do this yourself," I rasped, my voice sounding like sandpaper. "Rook can lead the sweep. You need to monitor the shield pylons.""The pylons are stable. Mira is running the di
The shield didn't just fail. It shattered.One moment, the silver membrane was holding strong, filtering the acid rain into harmless droplets. The next moment, there was a sound like glass breaking across the entire sky—a massive, crystalline crack that echoed through the fortress and into our bones.Then the dome was gone.The acid rain hit us like a wall of fire.I screamed as the first drops struck my skin, the chemical burn searing through my tactical gear, through my flesh. Around me, the archive filled with smoke as the acid ate through the ventilation system. The holographic tables sparked and died. The lights flickered and failed."LYRA!" Kael's roar was barely audible over the hiss of dissolving metal and the screams from outside.I couldn't breathe. The air itself was burning. My royal core was a hollow, aching void, completely depleted from holding the shield for the past twelve hours. But I could feel them—three hundred people in the fortress, in the barracks, in the greenho







