Death had a scent. It always did. The stale, metallic rot of decay. The acrid tang of burning flesh. The quiet, creeping stench of something long dead but never truly gone.

  But this—this was something far greater. This was the death of an entire ecosystem.

  It hung thick in the air, clinging to the ruins, seeping into the water, curling around every breath my drones took. It was not just the end of an ecosystem or the slaughter of an entire species. It was the slow, agonizing suffocation of a planet itself, one I intended to conquer.

  Unlike the slaughter I had committed on Phaedra, I had both freedom and constraint here. The enemy had quickly adapted. They took no chances. They had learned from their failure and were determined not to repeat it.

  The sky pulsed with the rhythmic hum of their machines. Drones in perfect gridlock formations, scanning every ripple of the ocean, every tremor of the ground, every disturbance in the atmosphere. While troop transports descended in five-minute intervals, the weight of their arrival shaking the ruined coastline.

  And through it all, they hunted me.

  Rain lashed against the shattered earth, mixing with dust storms and the lingering radiation of nuclear fire, turning the terrain into a drowning morass of filth.

  My scouts slithered through the sludge and muck, their movements seamless, merging with the ruins, their countless eyes always constantly monitoring their movements.

  The clones that patrolled the wasteland had their armour dulled by mud, soot, and ash. Their formation looked precise, but their movements were… off. Twitching fingers, restless glances, small hesitations before rounding corners.

  They knew I was here.

  They whispered to each other in hushed voices, their paranoia thick enough to taste. They flinched at the wind. They startled at the shadows. But not once did they fire.

  For fifty days I watched them. Fifty days I mapped their weaknesses, their habits, and their rotations and gave them fifty days of silence.

  Patience had been a luxury before. Now it was a necessity.

  Unlike before, I had no foothold within their ranks. No stolen minds. No infected voices whispering secrets to me. That would not matter soon.

  I knew the cracks forming in their discipline. I knew the way unease spread like rot in even the most efficient armies. I knew how long it would take before one of them snapped—before a single nervous clone fired at nothing before the panic took root before they turned on each other.

  And beneath them, my new world grew.

  Far below the roiling ocean, my biomorphs carved through the seabed, their vast, undulating bodies twisting through the abyss, constructing the next bio-fabricators, preparing for emergence day.

  The enemy command remained blind to the depth of my expansion, as their obsession with Phaedra kept them ignorant of the storm building beneath their feet. They were more focused on reclaiming their lost wealth.

  Still, their clones resisted in the north, chipped remnants clung to the last scraps of their defiance. Saboteurs in the west and east set facilities to be destroyed by nuclear fire rather than let me claim them. Each engagement saw fewer captives after those actions.

  They knew what awaited them in my grasp.

  They were a slow-dying nuisance that I eagerly hunted down.

  I pulled my focus back to my new project as I gazed up at my ship pods as the biomass shifted within them. The Zhyrraak had gone through a third redesign.

  Their grey carapace had grown thicker, and denser—a result of the abundant Kranrhotite I had fused with their reinforced bone structure. Over this, I layered segmented plating.

  Each layer was engineered to shed on impact, breaking away in the wake of debris fields, missile bombardments, or concentrated laser fire. It absorbed the full force of an attack before discarding itself, leaving the core structure intact and ready to endure the next assault.

  I had learned from the Grithan’s. Their lasers cut through my first-generation ships with contemptuous ease. I would not allow a second slaughter.

  The ship still housed the same armament with bone launchers equipped with acid and plasma ammunition, and miniaturized star Lance missiles —twenty-five per vessel, with an additional five more set aside for boarding action. It now included a new crude laser mimicking the Grithan design. It would act as my primary missile defence.

  Speed and evasion remained the highest priority for the Zhyrraak class. Every refinement, every optimization, was centred around agility—its reactor tuned for blistering acceleration, its laser defence grid recalibrated for maximum efficiency.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  But raw speed was not enough. The ship required a robust, adaptive internal system to support its cybernetic core. I reinforced its skeletal structure, layering a flexible yet durable bone framework throughout the vessel, allowing for both resilience and adaptability under stress.

  The design grew more intricate. Passageways expanded, maintenance hatches multiplied, and hidden compartments were integrated to store vital spare parts.

  Every section of the ship was optimized for endurance—not just in battle, but in prolonged engagements where rapid field repairs would be the difference between survival and annihilation.

  The Architects evolved alongside the ship. They were smaller and more versatile. They became the silent engineers, maintaining the vessel’s integrity, repairing damage mid-flight, and adapting to any crisis with the biomorph.

  But their role would not be limited to repair. If the unthinkable happened—if an enemy breached the hull—they would enact a final directive.

  The core would overload. The ship would become a funeral pyre.

  Nothing would be left for the enemy to claim.

  I checked the time as I monitored the countdown I set, it would soon be time.

  Phaedra would be under my full control within a thirty-three-day time frame was my best estimation.

  Imreth was next with a full-scale campaign in the next fifty days.

  Then an invasion of Ivinal, the frozen moon, within the next two hundred days or less.

  And when all three were under my control when I had choked the last breath from the defenders.

  I would hunt down the last of them all across the entire solar system.

  ———

  Rain hammered against the scorched coastline, turning the ash and mud beneath their boots into a thick, sucking mire.

  The hills in the distance glowed with the smouldering remains of a battle long since lost, casting an eerie, dull light through the dense layers of storm clouds and drifting soot.

  The clones stood in silence, their armour caked in grime, their visors streaked with filth. The downpour did little to wash away the weight of what they hadn’t seen.

  “0004A, you're staring again,” CT-7123 muttered, adjusting his soaked rifle strap. His voice carried the rough edge of someone who had lived through too much.

  The younger clone hesitated. “You fought one, didn’t you?”

  The others glanced over, rain pattering against their helmets.

  CT-7123 exhaled. “Yeah.”

  “What was it like?” 0007A asked, his voice quieter, almost hesitant.

  CT-7123 was silent for a long moment. Then, he turned his helmet slightly, the visor reflecting the distant embers of a burning ridge.

  “Like trying to fight a shadow. You see it, you aim, you fire… and then it’s just not there. And when it finally moves—” He tapped a deep scar on his chest plate. “If you don’t react in time. You die, if you're lucky, you survive.”

  0002A shifted. “So we can kill them?”

  CT-7123 gave a dry chuckle. “Kill? Sure. You kill a few hundred, but it doesn't matter, they come back with a hundred thousand. But even then… They keep coming. They adapt.”

  0009A adjusted his stance. “We’ve all heard the stories. That they can see through our helmets, that they predict our moves before we make them. Are the rumours true?”

  CT-7123 was quiet again. The rain dripped from his visor as he considered his response. “It’s worse than that. They don’t just predict. They learn. I fought one on the lunar surface and got a clean shot through the torso. Watched it fall. Thought it was dead.”

  He let out a slow breath. “Then, a few minutes later, another one came. Moved exactly like the first. Same attack patterns, the same damn feints. As if it had taken everything the first one learned… and kept going.”

  0007A’s grip tightened around his rifle. “So they share knowledge?”

  CT-7123 nodded. “Yeah. And the more they fight us, the smarter they get.”

  The rain fell heavier. The darkened sky pressed down on them, the weight of everything unsaid settling between them.

  0010A shook his head. “Then what the hell are we still doing here?”

  CT-7123 turned back toward the ruins ahead, his voice carrying over the storm.

  “Waiting for the next fight.”

  0004A scoffed, kicking at the mud. “Great. Standing in the rain, waiting to get killed by something we can’t even see coming. What kind of war is this?”

  CT-7123 didn’t answer immediately. He looked at the horizon, watching the smoke twist into the storm. “Not a war,” he finally said. “A slow death. We just haven’t fallen yet.”

  The group went quiet, listening to the rain, and the distant crackle of fire