Page 1 of Akur

1

Akur

Star date:Three cycles ago

The gravity beamsliced through the chaos like a blade of pure light, and everything went silent.

Akur’s ears rang from the explosion that had just rocked the Restitution’s base. Lifeblood trickled down his forehead, mixing with the sweat and grime of battle. Through the smoke, he glimpsed the massive Tasqal ship hovering above—its hull a nightmare of dark metal and pulsing energy nodes.

Time slowed. “Qrak.” It all but stopped.

Another boom rocked the area, and everything nearby—everything including him and the human he was carrying in his arms—vibrated with a hum that went straight down to his very cells. The ground beneath his feet crackled with building energy, making his nefre pulse in warning. That sixth sense all Shum’ai warriors possessed was screaming danger.

Gravity beam. They needed to run.

But he couldn’t move.

The beam was already active.

Distantly, he heard bodies fall. Heard them break. Rebels who had fought alongside him for many moons. Brothers he’d trained with, bled with, survived with—now scattered like nothing across their once thriving base.

The war they’d known was coming had finally arrived. The Tasqals had launched an all-out attack…but the Restitution hadn’t been ready.

“Hold on!” The command came from his comrade nearby. V’Alen fell to the ground, his cybernetic suit lighting up as he braced hard over the human he was protecting, and everything snapped back into place.

In a single click, time sped up once more.

Air rushed into his lungs as the particles around him began rising. And the light, that qrakking beam that had illuminated them just moments before, suddenly became like a living thing.

Gravity ceased to exist.

The human he’d been taking to safety was no longer in his arms. She floated out of them even as he tried to hold on. His digits barely brushed her arm as the beam lifted them both—suspended in a moment of weightlessness. A moment of terrible inevitability.

They were taking her. The Tasqals. They hadn’t only come for the new weapon hidden here on the Restitution’s base—that mysterious orb no one understood. They’d come for these females, too.

Grabbing the female’s arm, he held on with everything he had. Muscles straining, tendons pulled taut, his digits locked with hers while his other claw gripped the broken edge of a building.

But the gravity beam was a merciless thing—a column of light that defied Shum’ai strength, defied even his determination. The ground beneath him was breaking apart under the pull, his entire body a living anchor fighting against an impossible force.

But the beam was an unrelenting foe.

“Kon-stahns!!”

Kon…stahns. That was her name? It floated on the energy-infused air, a strained cry that came from the lips of the human V’Alen braced over. But Kon-stahns didn’t respond. Instead, her gaze locked with his. Those strangely bright eyes—so blue they were almost white—held the quiet horror of someone watching their death approach. She scrambled to grab hold of the one thing anchoring her to the ground.

Him.

But it wasn’t enough.

His hold on her didn’t fail, but something else did. The piece of building he was gripping suddenly crumbled. In a moment of suspended time, he was floating with the human upward, his body frozen as if tied by invisible threads that prevented him from doing a thing.

His gaze flicked to the massive ship pulling them into itself before his focus shifted back to the human floating upside down just above him. There was nothing to grab, nothing to brace against. Just empty air and that strong pull upward. And like entering the maw of some beast while completely paralyzed, there was nothing he could do.

His greatest fear had come true.

So long wanting to end this war…but rendered completely helpless when it mattered most.

The moment the beam deposited them into the damned vessel was the exact moment the Tasqals’ minions, the Hedgeruds, descended. There was no time to think. He was grasping his blade before the thought even reached his mind. With a roar, it slid through flesh, taking one guard down. But there were too many. And the human…

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