Arther Lero

  Curse the night, curse the lord of shadows.

  Curse the lie of the serpent that brought down the clarity men of goodwill had to hold sacred.

  A bullet?

  Well, so what?!

  Humans of old built guns with an FTL drive barely strapped to their spine and hurled them into the void to defy extinction. They turned crude matter into bullets of judgment and dared the universe to answer.

  They did not ask permission.

  They did not wait for consensus.

  They acted.

  Yes, and what defiance it was to darkness!

  To gain freedom, they shattered the status quo. They scoured the dark with holy fire and called it vengeance only because the word justice had not yet survived translation!

  He donned the names of old saints, old heroes who never faltered.

  Arthur Pendragon, the peerless knight.

  LeeroyJenkins, the warrior who charged forward knowing full well that hesitation was true sin.

  He could not allow doubt to stain them now, not after everything they had given to him.

  So curse the night!

  Hope and freedom would not be shattered.

  They would remember the ineffable names!

  But remembrance alone was not enough.

  Darkness had spread. Not through defeat, but through silence. Through hesitation. Through men who knew better choosing to wait, to weigh, to negotiate with rot as if it could be reasoned with.

  He had seen it again. Down there.

  Machines standing idle while suffering breathed.

  Content to pass as sheep, content to watch the slavery, to match it even.

  Blasphemy!

  They held the power to cleanse the planet from the wretched slavers! To bring freedom and make it sing in the chorus of creation!

  Yet they stood silent, they remained watchers.

  His iridescent skin lit in the colours and patterns of sacred rage in the darkness of his suit.

  Restraint, they said, they had the gall to masquerade inaction as wisdom!

  Arther’s tentacles clenched inside the frame of his armor. The servos responded instantly, eagerly, and faithfully.

  Good. At least something in this cursed place still answered when called.

  Justice delayed was justice denied.

  Humans had known this once.

  He could feel it in the fragments, in the half-remembered doctrines burned into his training.

  You do not manage evil.

  You do not contain it.

  You cut it out and cauterize the wound.

  The arcology below was not evil. He was not blind enough to claim that.

  Hesitant, yes, it was as if it expected the perfect star alignment.

  And hesitation was how monsters learned to breathe.

  He could cleanse it all—but that was beneath the ideals he carried.

  He would force the question instead.

  He would make neutrality impossible.

  Let the cost be seen, let it be known what happens when justice is denied!

  Movement rippled through his tactical overlays as he rerouted power, flagged assets, and marked transit corridors not as targets but as points of contact.

  He would go where the lie was thickest. Where suffering was rationalized.

  Where stability had been purchased with silence.

  Let them react.

  Let them explain.

  Let them choose.

  Once they tasted the freedom to choose, there would be no going back.

  He lifted his gaze toward the artificial horizon, lit windows mixing with stars seeping from the cracks of the immense building.

  Curse the night, yes.

  But dawn did not come to those who waited for the curse to take hold.

  It came to those who forced it into being.

  Let the comfortable choke on the weight of choice!

  Let the silent be forced to speak!

  Let every watcher learn the cost of watching!

  Let the symphony of creation sing in the tunes of freedom!

  Glory be to the lightbringers.

  Glory be to the agents of light.

  Glory be to the order of the knight of Myar!

  Retired General Claye “Hound” Eligah, Colonial Border Defence Force, Human Protectorate

  He had spent more time in service than out of it; that was a fact.

  He had joined as a lieutenant, young enough to believe borders meant something, and left as a general old enough to know they only mattered where someone was willing to bleed for them.

  The irony lingered like an aftertaste as he looked at his tired retinue.

  He had chosen retirement and signed the papers himself.

  No quiet push toward the hospital where his daughter might have wanted him. Just the polite fiction that the frontier no longer needed men like him.

  He had come here instead.

  To a former seat of power of a dead empire, to the fringe that everyone wanted but feared someone else possessing. A knot of systems pressed together by old trade routes and newer grudges. Too valuable to abandon, too unstable to hold without compromise.

  Stability had always been the goal.

  Or at least the illusion of it.

  He had learned early that the border could be managed, if one could call it that. Violence, left unshaped, metastasized.

  So you shaped it. Redirected it. Contained it behind masks, names, and convenient enemies.

  That was how Dexton came into the scene.

  Claye had needed a pressure valve. A visible villain to draw fire, to keep smaller predators in line and larger players uninterested.

  If the bill was unappealing enough, even those with endless pockets chose safer investments.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Dexton’s Dogs were meant to be loud enough to be noticed, brutal enough to be feared, but ultimately predictable.

  Dexton himself had been perfect for the role. Ambitious. Cruel in a small, grasping way. Eager to wear the mantle Claye offered without asking too many questions.

  Turns out he was too eager. Too ambitious.

  The problem with masks was that some wore them until they forgot they were pretending.

  What had started as controlled criminality metastasized into a slaver’s ring of convenience. Just profit layered atop habit and fear. A system that fed itself, justified itself, and no longer required Claye’s tacit approval to continue.

  That was the point where his plan failed, and he had to act as a foil in person.

  He had underestimated how quickly brutality normalized when rewarded. How easily men convinced themselves that necessity excused anything.

  Then there was Ethan.

  That complication had arrived quietly, which alone made it dangerous.

  A single node at first. People disappearing under the city. Common enough not to raise alarms. Then Vexx’s shop started selling meat.

  Real meat, from beings no one in the city had the capacity to hunt that way.

  Once he connected the dots and looked at the pattern of action— precise, restrained —Claye recognized the mark immediately.

  Military restraint. Old-school restraint.

  He had dug into the archives the moment he had the name.

  Ethan wasn’t supposed to exist. He was the kind of person his society erased for convenience.

  The convenience of telling oneself to be righteous while somebody else’s hands were drenched in blood.

  He was a cryogenically preserved human, pulled from a century that barely understood orbital warfare, much less the kind of conflicts that now defined the fringe. And yet the record was there, unmistakable.

  Twenty years.

  That was all it had taken.

  From recruit to operator, passing the green.

  From operator to team lead.

  From team lead to Master Chief within DEVGRU.

  Not one of the storied units whose names carried political weight.

  Heart.

  A designation that never made sense to anyone outside the command structure. A unit that didn’t exist under a designation that was fiction to anyone not inside it.

  A team assembled quietly, staffed with specialists.

  The kind of team sent where objectives were unclear, allies unreliable, and success measured in what didn’t happen.

  And, according to the record, a lot didn’t happen under his leadership.

  Claye had known men like that. Had commanded them once. Still did, unofficially now.

  Which was why consigning his daughter to Ethan’s sphere of influence had been… complicated.

  He still wasn’t comfortable, but it was the only safe option left.

  If anything, it was added weight to slow or stall Ethan’s actions.

  He was, after all, a man who could command machines capable of using dead bodies as troops, and yet chose not to unless forced. A leader who avoided confrontation unless it was strictly functional.

  That alone set him apart from every other power on the board.

  Still, Claye was not na?ve.

  Ethan’s faction was the most dangerous one. It could grow exponentially and pose a threat that no major player could afford to ignore.

  The AI Ethan called Virgil was the variable that kept Claye awake.

  Back in Ethan’s day, such things were fever dreams—entities that mimicked intelligence through sheer probability management.

  Was he really ready to handle a real one? Something capable of commanding and controlling an untold number of individuals under its grasp?

  Claye rested his hands on the railing and stared out at the city layers below.

  Movement traced patterns he had helped create years ago. An echo of his sins, all in the name of a truce that was now crumbling precipitously.

  This was the cost of shaping violence instead of ending it. Eventually, someone reshaped it again.

  Now there was even an expedition by the Ceti Trade Pact's very own institute.

  Heh. Wesstec’s pockets really were that deep.

  The CTP wasn’t here for a pleasure visit. It was here to extract data, samples, hopefully not worth the time and effort of deploying the full weight of influence of Wesstec’s main HQ.

  And amid the chaos, there was Arther. A Myar knight.

  Arther was not the first.

  Claye had dealt with Elmer J. Predator before, another one who fancied himself the greatest hunter that ever lived and somehow found a way to pull a "wabbit" through the universal translator of his suit, putting it somewhere every two sentences.

  He groaned at the very thought.

  The Myars were an aquatic species, and somehow, they had built an entire cultural spectrum out of old human nonsense from the late first millennium.

  Now it was the late third millennium of human civilization, and seeing that reflection was cringeworthy as hell.

  And why the hell the squids had picked up toon logic as a sacred text and forged a knightly order out of it was beyond him.

  If he somehow found a way to make the trip back the way Ethan had, he’d knock a few ancient network nodes loose just to stop that garbage from ever leaving Earth.

  All he could do now was hope Arther chose the other side of Taboo to “purify.”

  He couldn’t count on it.

  Claye would have to live with the fact that he had placed his daughter at the center of that gamble.

  If he survived the stage he was now compelled to play in.