Chapter 6: We Went With Another Candidate

KRRACK.

The silver wrist bands on 7709 exploded. She was in Landon’s arms. He was the blast radius. Silver shrapnel punched into his forearms, his chest, his hands, and every piece of him that was touching her.

The arena was still buffering when her ankle cuffs went POP-POP. But Derek was already moving before the sound even happened. In a blur, he hunched over her legs like a brother-shielding bomb shelter.

KRRACK.

The ankle cuffs exploded. Every silver fragment that should have hit Landon or the crowd buried itself into his chest and ribs instead. He took it with a grunt. Then he forced himself upright as his blood dripped onto the sand.

For a second, the crowd was frozen. Then the jumbotron zoomed and the arena recoiled as one traumatized organism.

Blood everywhere. 7709’s black training suit looked like it’d lost an argument with a blender. It looked painful because it was. It also looked like silver, which is worse. In a wolf’s blood, silver spreads like poison until it’s removed. If it hits the heart, the heart clocks out. All three of them had fragments working their way deeper and the window to pull them out was shrinking.

"Alpha Thunderfang, are you alright?" Celeste called as she closed the distance. She looked up at the panel of elders. "That slave just used her bands as a weapon against an Alpha. What more proof do you need? Please, let us remove her."

Landon turned away from Starborne and didn’t spare her a glance. Instead he looked at the elders.

"Don’t match me with her. I won’t accept."

Ten thousand jaws hit ten thousand laps in the same second. One commentator did not know the runes were on his voice still and said, "Holy fuck. Kill the feed. Actually, don’t. Zoom in."

Landon turned towards Alpha Starborne.

"I’m calling for a Helix full Council vote to strip Starborne of its slave license."

Starborne laughed, thoroughly amused.

"You overstep, Thunderfang," he called down. "Look around. The majority of Alphas in this building have wolves in silver. You threaten one of us, you threaten us all."

"Wait, time out." Derek held up a bloody palm. "You pimp slaves for a living, your temper-tantrum-trust-fund princess just got rejected by two Thunderfangs, and you put kill switches in your slave bands. Something that has been banned continent-wide for over two-hundred years if anyone was wondering." He paused. "And you are saying we overstepped." He looked at the jumbotron. "Tell me someone else is hearing this shit."

The arena answered him with one word.

"YES."

Starborne’s eyes stayed on Landon.

"You threaten my pack’s livelihood. Then you let your brother insult my daughter. And you’re holding my property like it belongs to you. I count three violations and zero apologies, Thunderfang."

"I’ll give you a fourth," Landon replied. "I’m invoking wartime protocol now in front of every Alpha and Elder in Helix. That means I’m not stripping your slave license, Starborne. I’m stripping your pack status. Effective immediately."

Starborne’s smirk widened.

"I offered you a dynasty, Thunderfang. You chose a slave."

His eyes surged molten gold. Then he issued an Alpha command that changed history.

"All Starborne, shift."

Hundreds of Starborne pack members shifted in the arena.

For a split second, no one moved, in stunned disbelief. Then the first casualty happened. A Wavecrest boy of maybe twelve was walking back to his seat with snacks in his arms. His father yelled. Too late. Wrong place at the wrong time.

The Starborne wolves didn’t even notice the boy’s blood, three of them trampling over him like he was nothing. To them, he was. To the man screaming his name, he was everything.

The crowd who had waved at a princess sixty seconds ago was now watching a father scream over his son’s body and the distance between those two moments was the distance between the world they’d walked into this building with and the one they were leaving with.

The Wavecrest Alpha launched out of his seat. "Wavecrest, warriors. Barricade all pups. Move."

Immediately, half of the Alphas were barking the same orders to their packs, Landon included. But the other half were issuing attack commands, fully backing Starborne. And that was the part no one was ready for.

What happened next broke every universal wolf-law the Great War put into place. Laws that are taught to pups before their first shift and every Alpha swears to uphold before taking their seat. The type of warfare that happened to other people in cautionary tales and not in real life.

It started with fully-grown shifted wolves intentionally attacking pups and elders in human form. Wolves poured over the section barriers and did not discriminate. Most victims were part of packs too small to defend themselves. None of them were given the opportunity to surrender, or their Alphas would have.

A Lavamount pack elder shielded a mother and her pup with his own body. He was unarmed. Unshifted. Eighty years old. His body was the only thing he had to offer and he offered it without hesitation. No one would ever know except a mother who would carry his face in her chest for the rest of her life.

The Mistveil section had no warriors left standing. Their Alpha was down. Their Beta was covering three pups with his body.

"Every pack without warriors gets behind Thunderfang," Derek called out to Landon, already two steps ahead, but a cold flicker ran through him like he’d given this exact order in a room he couldn’t remember being in.

Landon didn’t question it, immediately mindlinking every Thunderfang wolf: Any pack without warriors, bring them into our lines. Now.

Thunderfang warriors cut through the chaos and reached Mistveil in under a minute.

The girl in Landon’s arms was dying and the silver embedded inside both him and Derek ensured neither could shift. They were weaponless, on a clock, at half strength and currently running across sand, trying to get to a tunnel.

Starborne wolves intercepted them halfway.

"Landon, go! I’m right behind you!" Derek called, body checking one so hard it pinwheeled in the sand.