Page 11 of Fate of Draga

A much smaller ship had a male who looked vaguely familiar striding down the ramp. He looked confused to see the pirate captain but didn’t say anything. “The queen mother said Queen Adelina wanted me to see you?”

Then it clicked. Darius was the royal guard who’d been inhabited by a Neprijat consciousness while he was Raena’s personal guard. Adelina wanted Asher to question him about what he remembered.

And if Delphine was here then she had intel Adelina deemed too important to risk over a transmission. Exact coordinates, outposts, and patrols no doubt – precise plans of attack to retake Khara.

Veri was about to open her mouth when theRoyal Rosanerashuddered so hard she stumbled and fell. “What in the bloody hells wasthat?” she asked, looking to Asher for answers.

Then the alarm sounded and Veri knew. She didn’t wait for Asher’s reply. She ran to one of the smaller warships – her favorite. Veri tapped her gauntlet as she ran and ordered her personal legion to her.

Asher grabbed her and pulled her back for a brief moment to kiss the very breath from her body. “Happy hunting,” he murmured, and then pushed her toward the ship.

Veri memorized the way he tasted and tucked it close to her heart.

The Neprijat were attacking, and this time…this time Veri wanted that victory.

Chapter Four

Asher

Royal Rosanera

The Core Border

The Draga System

Watching Veri run towards the battle would never be easy. Asher gritted his teeth and made his way to Command as quickly as he could. He needed to figure out what in the hells was going on and figure out a way to end this without depleting their army to the point they would be no help at all when they reached Khara.

The halls were full of warriors and personnel running – so many warriors heading to their fighters and everyone else going to their battle stations.

Another massive explosion hit his ship – the largest in the fleet – and Asher gritted his teeth, praying to any of the gods and goddesses who would listen. Their shields had been improved marginally, but they’d been focusing more on improving the weapons and the engines.

He burst onto Command, heart beating wildly and Asher calmed his breathing, demanding answers and explanations, reports, statuses – he needed it all. As numbers and info came at him, he watched the battle through the large floor to ceiling window nearly the entire length of the ship.

The armada had been forced to slow and engage. Speed would only do so much when the enemy was just as fast as they were. Had capturing that Neprijat alive triggered the attack? Or had it been Adelina taking Hai?

It didn’t matter. These Neprijat forces weren’t playing with them like they had the last time. The last attack on the border planets had been to eradicate their border supplies, forcing them to push back towards the Core and the capitol.

This time…Asher followed the patterns of their ships, mulling over the information he’d been given and…they were trying to stop them from reaching Khara’s border. They were afraid – to some degree at least.

Because if Asher was able to join forces with Adelina, it would be a lot harder to pick them off one by one.

“Shields?” he demanded, grabbing his spare armor from the compartment under his console.

“Should hold out for a bit longer, your highness,” the captain reported. “We’re at eighty percent, but their weapons—we can’t advance.”

“How many of them are there?” Asher asked, studying those black ships of death and destruction. They seemed endless.

“We can’t get a good count, your highness, but it seems like their whole fleet appeared out of nowhere. There are over five hundred thousand warships, not to mention their fighters.”

But it wasn’t their numbers – as the Royal Army and all those under him were far more. It was their strategy. They were separating as many ships as they could, sacrificing everything to take out the bigger ships.

Asher watched in horror as one of his warships broke apart. He couldn’t hear their screams as they died but he could feel them in his bones—his soul.

Tapping his console he waited for the cast to go through, pulling on his armor and activating it so it conformed to his body.

“Yes brother?” Adelina’s voice sounded concerned. After all it had only been a few hours since he’d heard from her last.

“I have sent out a probe to check if the coordinates we’ve received for the Neprijat home system are accurate. We are currently under attack by a much larger force than we assumed was still within our borders. I need to give you the probe’s command key.”

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