Page 112 of Fractured Souls

This Kordolian had no idea. He really had no fucking idea.

“I haven’t used this power on many of our kind.”

Nythian’s insides started to burn. A tingle ran through his entire body, similar to the sensation he’d experienced when Alexis used her power on him, only this time the feeling was sickening.

Ordinarily, the death-touch would have paralyzed him, but he was already paralyzed from the neck down, so it didn’t matter.

Wait…

“See, that’s the difference between Us and You. We will kill and destroy and torture to maintain our advantage. Your outdated notions of honor are ridiculous. We use our superiority to our advantage.”

He kept releasing the power—whatever it was—sending Nythian deeper and deeper into a dark hell of pain and fury.

“It took seven Tharian ghosts for me to be able to do this. The first six didn’t bond. The seventh… well, I knew what to do by then, as you can see. The Acolytes of Malku were very helpful in showing me how to use this unusual power.” The Kordolian twisted again, and Nythian’s vision went dark from the sheer agony of it all. “You see this Xargek behind me? Once you’re dead, it will go back in its box, and we will give it the stun gas, and it will become as docile as a tame Veronian, and I will have it shipped to him. A gift, if you will. You see, there’s a way to control everything, if you have the will.”

Nythian’s consciousness started to slip away. The detached feeling grew and grew. The Kordolian was still talking, but the words became blurred and indistinct as Nythian hovered between life and that other state…

He’d been here before, once.

He could ride this wave for a little while longer, just until…

Click. His vertebrae popped back into place. The idiot who was talking didn’t appear to notice above the sound of his own voice.

But although Nythian’s spinal cord had been repaired, he still couldn’t move.

That was the effect of the death-touch.

He could do one thing, though. He knew this because he’d experienced the death-touch at the most visceral level.

He shut out the world around him, shut out the sound of his enemy’s voice, shut out the immense pain.

He went to that cold, dark place inside his mind, where he could do anything.

Nythian summoned his nanites. The tiny machines withdrew, sucked through the pores of his skin and into his veins and arteries, burrowing through muscle and connective tissue and organ and bone.

He couldn’t maintain the form of his armor. It collapsed, leaving him naked and covered in his own blood and guts.

The bitter stench of blood filled the air.

The Kordolian laughed. “Your precious exo-armor not working so well now? Ah, but you’re a hard one to kill. The others went out so quickly. What exactly does it take to kill a monster like you, hmm?” He dug deeper with his claws, completely severing Nythian’s internal organs.

Nythian ignored him. He focused on the Kordolian’s hand, drawing his nanites toward it.

If his enemies decided to attack any other part of him now, he would be a dead man. Focusing all his nanites in one place was dangerous. It left the rest of him vulnerable.

But they didn’t know that.

They were about to learn that everything they thought they knew about the First Division was wrong.

He was much, much worse than what the rumors made him out to be.

He closed his eyes. The nanites surged, a dark extension of his will. They coalesced in his belly, around his guts, around the blue hand of his enemy.

After repairing the extensive damage to his body, they were hungry for protein.

Starved, in fact.

The noble’s voice drifted back into his consciousness. “You know what the lesser races on Zarhab Groht call her?” He was drunk on his own power, a fanatical look in his eyes, his expression insufferably haughty.

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