Page 20 of Protected By the Alien Knight

Keeping low in a catlike crouch, I launch myself forward in a burst of speed, dagger extending as I close the gap before the Huxarian monster can turn fully in my direction. By the time his massive head swings around, I’m already sliding across the last meters toward my children.

Alice’s eyes blow wide, her lips parting on a soundless cry of relief and renewed horror as the beast’s plasma rifle whips up to sear a path directly through me to get her in his sights.

With a feral snarl of outraged denial, I hurl myself over Max and Alice at the last possible second, our bodies tumbling and rolling away from the discharged bolt’s searing ion path as it bores a fist-sized crater in the cracked tile where their skulls were a breath before.

Even as we slam to a halt in a groaning heap of tangled limbs, I’ve already reversed my grip on the khari’ak dagger and started sawing with desperate intensity at the bindings holding my children’s wrists behind their backs.

“We’ve got one chance!” I growl, sweat stinging my eyes. “Max, as soon as you’re free, get your sister out of here any way you can!”

As if in demented slow motion, I see the Huxarian leader pivot with lumbering finality, his plasma rifle leveling once more as his slavering maw stretches wide in a roar of pure, bestial fury...

“So the cowardly human worm dares show her face!” His reptilian growl shakes the tiles beneath our tangled forms. “And just in time to watch me execute your nestlings!”

He tenses to squeeze the trigger, but I hurl myself forward with a primal scream. My shoulder slams into his rifle arm, knocking the weapon aside just as it discharges. The searing plasma bolt scorches past, narrowly missing Max’s prone form.

The Huxarian leader snarls in rage, his free hand whipping a curved dagger from a sheath on his belt in a blurred crescent of reflected light. For a moment, it seems as though the wicked point will simply shear through my son’s exposed back.

But I manage to interpose myself, taking the brunt of the leader’s mass as we crash to the floor in a tangle of flailing limbs and snapping jaws. The dagger clatters aside, though I feel a fiery line of agony slice across my bicep from its glancing blow.

But just then, Crux erupts from the shadows like an avenging angel given corporeal form. With a resounding clash of plasma and tempered gundrian alloy, his plasma blade locks in furious stalemate against the Huxarian’s in a shower of searing sparks.

“You’ll not butcher another innocent while I still draw breath,” Crux’s amplified snarl booms with a resonance that shakes my bones. “I shall rend your flesh to pieces, an offering of redemption for your damned soul.”

The behemoth Huxarian roars back, shoving Crux away only for my knight to flow straight back into a whirlwind of blinding strikes from seemingly every angle simultaneously.

Seizing the opportunity, I redouble my efforts, slicing through Max and Alice’s bonds until the last fibers part with a final, relieving snap. Shoving the dagger into Max’s hands, I shovethem both toward the exit corridor even as the klaxons begin blaring, signaling the arrival of reinforcements.

“Get to the panic room; lock it, don’t open it; no matter what!” I scream over the din of searing plasma and shearing metal.

But Max remains rooted, refusing to abandon me even as the sound of armored boots begins echoing up the passage. Squinting past the roiling plasma clouds, I recognize the iconic war-masks of Ven’ari’s Avenian Knights forming a bristling perimeter.

And in their lead, the towering figure of Ven’ari himself, resplendent in his ancient Avenian armor—the glare of his pitiless yellow stare finding and locking onto Crux’s embattled form.

Seizing Max by the shoulder, I try to reason with him one last time.

“Max, please... get your sister to the panic room. It’s safe and defensible. Crux and I will hold them here as long as we—”

The words catch in my throat as a deafening subsonic detonation shakes the entire room, dropping us all to our knees. Even the Huxarian leader staggers and nearly falls as I instinctively shield Alice and Max’s bodies with my own.

When the ringing in my ears finally clears enough to make out coherent sounds, my blood turns to ice water in my veins. Because coming from the Huxarian leader’s snarling maw, dripping with arrogant contempt, are the very words my darkest nightmares have long feared:

“... surrender and your offspring go unharmed, worm. Refuse, and I’ll butcher them here and now before your useless eyes.”

I meet Crux’s stare across the maelstrom. Try as I might, I cannot parse the myriad calculations flickering across his eyes in that instant. I silently beg him with every fiber of my being. Our bond, this ineffable connection between us, has to be enough tomake him understand what’s at stake here. That Alice and Max’s lives dangle by a horrifyingly tenuous thread.

Tears streak my bloodied face as I drink in every sacred detail of my children’s battered forms. If Crux doesn’t intercede, doesn’t make the right call in this split second... then their fragile sparks of life will be forever extinguished before my eyes. And that’s a void of torment from which I could never, ever escape.

All I can do is hold my breath, hoping against hope that the bond between us is enough to spare my children from this latest horror. Because his next move will decide whether Alice and Max draw their next breaths... or join the rapidly growing tally of dead littering my kitchen.

Crux’s blade arm tenses almost imperceptibly, as though containing a descent into howling madness by sheer force of will alone. For an eternal moment, his gaze bores straight through me, seeing everything yet absolutely nothing in one searing glance.

Then, with a sound halfway between a primal roar and the laser-whine of rending ordnance, he pivots into a blinding flurry of motion. The Huxarian’s rifle shoots through empty space as Crux flows beneath it like smoke on the wind. One moment he is across the chamber, the next he has materialized over the Huxarian’s shoulder like a phantasmic horror sprung from a nightmare.

White-hot plasma shrieks through the air, vaporizing scales and viscera in a blinding maelstrom that separates flesh from bone before my disbelieving eyes. The Huxarian leader’s shrill cries of agony are cut mercifully short as Crux’s blade takes his head in one sweeping flurry.

Even before the Huxarian leader’s corpse finishes crumpling, Crux whirls with blinding speed. His wrist-blaster snaps up, jaw clenched as disruptor staves and blaster barrels level at him from the encroaching Avenian Knights.

“Hold!” Crux’s amplified roar shakes the chamber. “I’ll not cut down those who were once my brothers!”

---