CHAPTER 128: AN EMPEROR’S FALL

The duel began with a roar of silent fire.

Inside the cockpit of his Apex Mech, Lord Valerius’s face was a mask of triumphant fury. "Die!" he screamed, jamming his thumb down on the firing stud.

The plasma cannon on the mech’s right arm unleashed a torrent of energy, a brilliant, blindingly white beam that shot across the blackness of space.

It was a spear of pure destruction, hot enough to melt the hull of a starship, fast enough to cross the distance to its target in less than a second. For anyone watching, it looked like the end. A tiny human figure was about to be completely erased from existence.

But Ryan didn’t move. He simply watched the beam of death approach. As it got closer, he raised a single, calm hand. His eyes glowed with a soft, silvery light. System, he commanded in his mind, Impose Rule: Temporal Field. Slow.

The effect was subtle, yet reality-bending. The space directly in front of Ryan warped. The spear of white-hot plasma, which had been moving at a fraction of the speed of light, suddenly seemed to hit an invisible wall of thick, cosmic molasse.

It slowed dramatically, its ferocious energy becoming a lazy, almost graceful river of light. It was still deadly, still impossibly hot, but it was now moving so slowly that Ryan could have sidestepped it with ease.

Instead, he did something even more unbelievable. He didn’t just dodge it. He phased. His body became translucent, a shimmering outline of a man made of starlight.

The slow-moving river of plasma passed harmlessly right through him, the deadly energy washing over his ghostly form without touching a single molecule.

A second later, his body solidified, completely unharmed, as the plasma beam continued its slow, harmless journey into the void behind him.

On the bridge of the Odyssey, a collective gasp went through the crew.

"Did you see that?" Chris breathed, his eyes as wide as dinner plates. "He just... phased through it. Like a ghost!"

"He’s manipulating time and matter simultaneously," Zara whispered, her voice filled with a reverence usually reserved for Precursor artifacts.

"He’s not just breaking the laws of physics. He’s making up new ones as he goes."

Inside his mech, Valerius stared in disbelief, his triumphant grin frozen on his face. "What? Impossible! He should be vapor! Computer, analysis!"

"Anomaly detected," the mech’s calm voice replied. "Target’s physical state shifted to an intangible energy form. No explanation available."

"No explanation?" Valerius snarled, his confusion turning back to rage. "Then we use more firepower!"

He shifted his grip on the controls. The missile pod on the mech’s other arm opened, revealing dozens of small, deadly warheads. "If energy can’t hit you, let’s see you phase through solid matter! Fire all missiles! Full saturation barrage!"

A swarm of missiles shot out from the pod, leaving spiraling trails of smoke in the vacuum. They weren’t dumb rockets; they were smart, homing missiles, each one locking onto Ryan’s energy signature.

They spread out, planning to surround him and detonate all at once, leaving him no room to escape.

Ryan watched the swarm of deadly projectiles approach. He didn’t try to phase this time. Instead, his mind reached out again, touching the cold metal of the missiles, the complex electronics of their guidance systems.

He found the energy source in each one, the tiny power cell that ran their computers and thrusters. System, locate all power sources. Action: Energy Siphon.

It was a delicate, complex act, like snuffing out a hundred candles at the same time. All across the approaching swarm, the missiles suddenly went dead.

Their guidance lights blinked out. Their engines cut off. They tumbled uselessly through space, becoming nothing more than inert chunks of metal.

They floated past Ryan harmlessly, a silent, dead parade of failed technology.

Valerius slammed his fist against his console in pure frustration. Plasma didn’t work. Missiles didn’t work. His ultimate weapon, the Apex Mech, was being rendered completely useless.

He felt a sliver of real fear, a cold dread that crept past his arrogance. This wasn’t a fight. This was a magic show, and he was the stooge.

"Fine!" he roared, a desperate edge to his voice. "If I can’t shoot you, I will crush you with my own hands!"

He fired the mech’s powerful thrusters, sending the hundred-foot-tall war machine hurtling directly at Ryan. He raised one of the mech’s colossal metal hands, its fingers as big as shuttles, planning to simply swat the tiny man out of existence.

Ryan watched the giant mech charge towards him. It was like a mountain falling from the sky. This was Valerius’s final, desperate move. Brute force.

As the giant hand swung towards him, Ryan made his own move. His eyes glowed brighter than ever before. He wasn’t just manipulating the space around him now.

He was targeting the mech itself. His mind dove deep into the molecular structure of its armor plating. He found the strong, orderly bonds that held the super-hardened alloy together.

And with a single, focused thought, he gave a new command.

Impose Rule: Structural Brittleness.

Target: Left Arm Plating.

The giant hand swung. But just as it was about to hit Ryan, something strange happened. Cracks, like spiderwebs on a frozen window, appeared all over the surface of the mech’s arm. The super-strong metal, designed to withstand meteor strikes, suddenly became as fragile as cheap pottery.

The hand didn’t crush Ryan. It shattered.

The moment the mech’s hand made contact with the faint shimmer of Ryan’s personal reality field, it disintegrated. The metal fingers broke apart into thousands of tiny, useless pieces.

The entire arm, up to the elbow, crumbled into a cloud of metallic dust, the pieces scattering into the void.

The shock of the impact, and the sudden loss of a limb, sent the charging Apex Mech tumbling out of control. Valerius screamed in a mixture of pain and terror as his cockpit spun violently.

This was Ryan’s chance. The final, decisive move.

He didn’t attack the crippled mech. He didn’t fire a single shot. He simply pushed off the void, his body shooting forward like a silent bullet.

In the time it took for Valerius’s spinning mech to make a single rotation, Ryan was there. He phased again, his body becoming a shimmer of pure energy, and passed directly through the mech’s cockpit window as if it wasn’t even there.

He solidified inside the cockpit.

He stood there, perfectly calm, his dark cloak swirling around him, surrounded by the flashing red lights and blaring alarms of the crippled mech. He was less than five feet away from Lord Valerius.

Valerius stared, his face a mask of utter, mind-breaking terror. His enemy, the man he was trying to kill with a giant war machine, was now standing inside his cockpit, completely unharmed.

The unbreakable walls of his ultimate weapon had been no more of an obstacle than a curtain of smoke. His mind, so used to logic and predictable outcomes, simply broke.

He let out a choked, terrified squeak and shrank back in his command chair. The great Lord Valerius, leader of the Technocratic Hegemony, was reduced to a frightened child.

Ryan looked at the terrified man, but he felt no pity, no anger. He simply felt a sense of finality. He reached out and placed his hand, not on Valerius, but on the main console of the Apex Mech.

System, he commanded, one last time. Initiate Full System Override. Extract: Mastery of Hegemonic Technology.

The lights on the console flickered wildly. A flood of information, of blueprints, schematics, energy frequencies, and command codes, flowed from the mech’s core systems, through Ryan’s hand, and directly into his mind.

He was downloading the secrets of Valerius’s entire technological arsenal.

When he was done, the Apex Mech went completely dead. Its lights went out. Its thrusters died. It was now nothing but a massive, floating metal coffin, adrift in the void.

Ryan gave Valerius one last, long look. Then, he turned and phased back out of the cockpit, leaving the disgraced lord alone in his dark, silent monument to failure.

He floated back towards the Odyssey. The duel was over.

Defeated, humiliated, and utterly broken, Valerius gave the only order he could. His crippled flagship turned, and along with the rest of his shattered fleet, limped away into the darkness, retreating from the field of battle.

Sector Epsilon was saved. And its young lord, Kaelen, along with millions of spectators across the god verse, had just witnessed the fall of an emperor and the rise of a legend.

A legend who didn’t need an army or a war machine, because he could command reality itself.