Chapter 272: A Message [Edited]

The heavy silence on the bridge stretched until even the faint hum of the ship’s dormant circuits seemed loud.

Julie slowly lowered her camera, her hands trembling. For once, she wasn’t thinking about view counts or subscribers. The scale of what they had just heard made the Association’s petty disputes, media circuits, and hero rankings feel completely trivial.

"Harvest..." Julie whispered, her throat dry. "We’re not even a civilization to them. We’re just... crops."

"Food," Selena corrected quietly, staring at the dark metallic sphere above the console. "The entire history of modern heroes... the outbreak that devastated the world five decades ago... the impure mutations... it was all part of the cultivation process."

"A fertilizer," Nectron said. He crossed his massive arms, his expression grim. "Think about that for a second. An extraterrestrial civilization wanting high-yield energy doesn’t harvest a barren wasteland. They water the plant. They enrich the soil. The plague wasn’t released to kill us. It was released to force our bodies to adapt, cultivating abilities so that when the harvest finally arrived, the crop would be rich."

"And the harvester refused to send the yield," Vixen said, looking around the command deck. "Look at this place. Look at the power required to cross star systems. Why would an advanced being throw away his life, betray an entire cosmic empire, and crash his dreadnought into the Sahara just to spare a planet like Earth?"

"Maybe he developed a conscience after watching us," Selena suggested, taking a few steps across the floor. "Perhaps watching humanity struggle against the mutation made him see us as living beings rather than livestock."

"Or maybe he rebelled against the Dominion itself," Zero countered coldly, his hand resting on the hilt of his longsword. "A warrior does not abandon his post without conviction. Ikar was an Archon. If he rebelled, he knew the consequence was total annihilation. He didn’t just stop the harvest. He crippled his own vessel to buy this planet time."

Nicholas stood slightly apart from the group, his arms folded loosely as he stared at the empty space where the holographic projection had been.

"Why he did it doesn’t change the problem in front of us," Nicholas said calmly. "The cultivation already happened. Humanity has spent fifty years awakening abilities, growing stronger, and building a society around that power. We are ripe. And the fleet is coming to reap."

"Ten standard cycles," Julie squeaked, nervously tugging the brim of her oversized sunhat. "The creepy guy on the screen said he had ten cycles to respond before they came to destroy him! How long is an alien cycle?! Is that ten days? Ten months? Ten years?!"

"We won’t figure it out standing on the bridge," Nicholas said, turning toward the corridor leading deeper into the vessel. "Zero, where is the main power plant?"

"Through the lower transit spine," Zero replied, pointing toward a descending ramp at the rear of the command deck. "The primary reactor room is directly above the sub-light drive core. If there are any functional logs or records left behind, they will be there."

"Move out," Nicholas ordered quietly.

The strike team followed him, leaving the bridge behind.

The corridor leading to the engine decks was darker and colder than the upper levels. The ceiling disappeared into shadow, with massive conduits hanging above them. The deeper they went, the thicker the air became with ozone and concentrated plague essence.

Nicholas felt the energy brushing against his skin. It was pure and raw—the same energy that fueled his Void ability and allowed his Plague Touch to condense matter. It was a chilling realization that the lethal energy which had nearly destroyed his body during his awakening in Grayland was actually cosmic fertilizer designed to enrich his soul for slaughter.

After passing through three security bulkheads that had frozen half-open, the corridor opened into the engine room.

The chamber was easily the size of an underground stadium. Tall containment pillars stretched from floor to ceiling, housing massive glass-like cylinders that had once held crystallized power. Most of them were completely empty, their magnetic clamps left open.

Giant turbines sat silent in the center of the room, anchored to the floor by massive magnetic rails.

"Look at the empty containment sleeves," Nectron said, looking up at the energy manifolds. "This entire power plant was stripped bare."

"Someone took the batteries," Vixen noted.

Nicholas walked along the central catwalk toward the main control pedestal, his senses sweeping the surrounding area.

As he reached it, something caught his eye.

Resting on the black-alloy control station, completely out of place among the alien machinery, was a physical object.

"Over here," Nicholas called out.

The team gathered around the pedestal, their lights focused on the console.

Pinned to the interface panel by a small shard of dark crystal was a piece of parchment.

It wasn’t alien alloy or a digital data drive. It was thick, fibrous animal hide that looked as though it had been salvaged from the desert decades ago.

"A physical note?" Vixen asked, leaning closer. "An advanced cosmic harvester left a written letter on a piece of leather?"

"If you want to hide something from a star fleet that tracks quantum signals, you don’t save a digital file on the ship’s mainframe," Selena explained. "You write it with ink on stone or hide."

Their lights fell across the parchment.

Dark, uneven markings covered its surface. The letters were English, but they were badly distorted. The handwriting was crude and shaky, with some letters reversed and others written in strange capitals. It looked like someone who had only recently learned how to write was trying to form the words.

Julie brought her camera closer. "Wait... is that English? How did an extraterrestrial even write this? Did he actually learn our language, or did he have some sort of translator device that helped him trace the letters?"

"Either he spent time studying human broadcasts after he crashed fifty years ago, or his suit’s neural interface roughly converted the phonetics for him," Selena replied, studying the writing. "Look at how uneven the strokes are. He clearly didn’t know how to hold a pen or use our alphabet naturally. He was forcing alien concepts into letters he could barely draw."

Nicholas studied the crude scrawl carefully, reading the fragmented words line by line:

"I... STOp... SEEd. FLeeT... COmINg. ThEY... WAIt... FOR... CRoP... TO... RIpEN. PLAGuE... IS... WATeR... FOR... SOUL... TO... MAkE... STROnG... HARVEsT."

Beneath the first paragraph was another set of broken sentences, alongside several crude sketches of continental landmasses marked with geometric symbols:

"I... STRIP... DRIVe... COReS. SHIp... STAyS... DEAd. I... HIdE... SEvEN... STONeS... ACROsS... SEvEN... LAnDS. FIgHT... WITh... ThE... POWEr... ThEY... GAvE... YOu. FInd... STONeS... BEFORe... SKY... BURnS."

Scattered below the writing were rough coordinates, marking locations where the master power gemstones had been scattered across the globe.

Silence settled over the engine room.

"The plague wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t a curse," Nectron said, his voice low. "It was water for the crop. They infected the planet fifty years ago to force us to evolve, to make our energy dense enough to feed their empire." ℴ

"And Ikar broke the cycle," Zero whispered, tightening his grip on his sword. He looked down at the purple gemstone embedded in his blade. "He didn’t just crash the ship. He pulled out the master power stones that run this dreadnought and scattered them across the world’s continents. The stone in my blade is just one fragment of the engine."

"He scattered the core so nobody could fire up the ship’s beacon," Vixen said, looking at the parchment. "And he left the coordinates behind so that if humanity survived long enough to awaken, we could find the power sources and fight back."

"This changes everything we know about the world," Selena said, stepping back from the pedestal. She reached into her vest and pulled out a sealed containment case lined with soft padding.

Using insulated tweezers, Selena carefully lifted the parchment from beneath the crystal shard and placed it inside the case. The lid sealed with a soft hiss, protecting the fragile artifact.

"The Association’s deciphering teams need to analyze every single fiber and crude coordinate marker on this hide," Selena stated, securing the case to her harness. "We need to map those seven locations before anyone else realizes what’s out there. Eric needs to see this immediately."

"Then we secure whatever dormant crystals are left in the main chamber and seal the site," Nicholas said, turning toward the massive vault doors behind them.

He didn’t care about cosmic empires or ancient alien politics. But looking at the vast alien vessel around them, he knew one thing with absolute certainty:

Humanity had been raised as cattle for slaughter.

And the only way to survive when the sky burned was to become the butcher instead.

[A/N: Thanks so much for the support and love! I’m really grateful, we’ve crossed over 360k words with this book! It’s been awesome. Thank you]