His memories flooded through mine in an endless nightmarish stream. To think I had thought myself monstrous… Nothing I had ever done or been tempted to do to others would ever even come close to the sadistic madness Khutu had unleashed on innumerable innocents for decades.
As I drilled through every single memory, as far as his subconscious could recollect, I trapped his mind in a continuous loop of the demise he’d just met at the hands of the Vanguard. After my first tangle with him while Ghosting through Sabra, I had thought him too psychically powerful for me to mind-control. Back then, the great distance and the fact that I had been making those attempts through Ghosting had greatly dimmed my power.
Now, however, I couldn’t say if my current ease at thoroughly dominating him was due to my enhanced powers since my maturity, his weakened state through this dying body, the beating his soul had already taken, or a combination of all of the above. Either way, I didn’t care. Seeing him drown in this never-ending well of agony while I plundered his mind was almost orgasmic.
The lasers deactivated on their own just as I was sucking out the last of his memories. My Dragon and Scelk brothers came flying in, soon followed by a few shuttles carrying some of the Warriors and psychic women.
“Seriously?” Tabitha asked as soon as Bane put her down after landing. “That piece of shit is like a fucking cockroach. He just doesn’t know when to die and stay dead.”
“What the fuck?” Bane asked, the same disturbed expression on Legion and Chaos’s face.
“Do not worry,” I said reassuringly. “This is the end of the road for him.” They all looked at me questioningly. “Remember what we were told about that Grotra project? The reason they hadn’t already run with it was that once the subject absorbed the DNA of its victim, it would only live for forty-eight hours before suffering massive organ failures. And the subject can only rewrite its DNA once.”
“So, that’s why he stole my Shell,” Bane mused out loud.
“That’s one part,” I said with a nod. “The other part is that he needed a lot of pure DNA from you to create new Shells. You drank Crinax before the start of the battle, which messed with it. If not for Sabra sensing the wrongness of his soul, he would have pretended to rejoin the battle, but instead would have flown back here through a secret passage, then absconded with me using one of these vessels,” I said, gesturing at them with my chin.
“That vermin can never fool my woman,” Chaos said smugly, looking at Sabra with possessive pride, which earned him a few chuckles.
“How do we know he’s not going to jump bodies again?” Commander Hulax asked with a concerned frown.
“There’s nowhere else for him to go,” I said matter-of-factly. “His soul now only acknowledges two strains of DNA: this abomination he turned himself into, and Bane’s. He has no duplicates of either to flee to. So, the choices are to either let him rot in this failing flesh prison for the forty-eight hours it has left, or end it here and now, once and for all.”
“It would be poetic justice for one so afraid of death to spend the last forty-eight hours of his life counting each second leading up to that inevitable demise,” Tremak said with a vicious smile that echoed what I felt.
“It would be,” Chaos conceded, “but it would also mean leaving someone here to watch and make sure he doesn’t get some kind of last-minute rescue.”
Both he and Legion turned towards Bane, deferring the decision to him.
“I tremendously enjoy his pain,” the Dragon leader said. “However, we have already wasted too much time on this vermin. I want him gone forever and to move on. We can enjoy the show of his soul decaying until he’s no more.” He turned to look at my mate and me and gave us an affectionate look. “Thank you, Linette, for saving our lives and showing off your mad flying skills. I never could have cleared that laser field.”
Linette flicked her hair smugly over her shoulder and grinned. “I told you all the greatest things come in small packages.”
“You have, and you have proven it,” Bane said as everyone chuckled. He then sobered and locked eyes with me. “You both caught this piece of shit. Your prey, your kill.”
“Gladly,” I said with a vicious smile.
I shifted the mind-trap to make the General think feral larvae were crawling on him and biting at his face while Swarm Drone larvae were feeding on his legs. Khutu clawed at his own face and chest to rid himself of the illusionary creatures—I did say I enjoyed making my victims self-mutilate—while my mate sprayed him with acid. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t last very long at all. I gave him the final blow with a one-two punch of my tail blade through each of his hearts. Then, for the seventeen following minutes, we stood watch as his soul slowly decayed, until it vanished.
General Khutu was no more.
Epilogue
Linette
The Kryptids and the Coalition took care of the clean-up, not only here, but at the multiple hidden locations Varnog had found reading Khutu’s mind. The Queen’s Guards had been decimated, barely a dozen of them left standing. But they had fought valiantly and honorably. Those who survived would have epic tales to add to the Well of Knowledge. We, too, had sustained losses. Most had been at the surface to those thrice-damned energy walls. A hundred and three souls including humans, Tegorians, Lenusians and fourteen Scelks. All things considered, it was far less than I had believed or expected, but even one soul was too great a price.
Queen Selixa had perished during the battle in the nursery. All the evidence pointed to an accidental shot by one of the Enhanced Workers. Either way, it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d already been born weak, and mating with the abomination Khutu had become had finished ruining her.
Queen Rahissa returned to Kryptor with her triumphant General Daeko, the two younger Queens and Generals, the rest of her Queen’s Guard and the rebels. The crippled Soldiers and Enhanced Workers who hadn’t perished during the battle were given cyanide. While I partially understood putting those Workers out of their misery as they no longer had any personal thoughts, emotions or feelings, I disagreed with the crippled Soldiers. They might not have been ‘flawless’ as their people expected for an offspring to be allowed to live, but they still could have contributed to rebuilding their society. Unfortunately, the Vanguard had no say in that matter.
Two weeks after their return, Rahissa stepped down from the throne, passing it on to Xerath who had at long last reached maturity, as well as Daeko. It saddened me to hear that the Workers had failed to find a way to reverse the damage Khutu had done to Rahissa. Therefore, the ruined Queen, too, chose to take cyanide. However, the new rulers of Kryptor initiated peace dialogues with the Galactic Coalition, the sincerity of their endeavor confirmed by the Scelks. Nevertheless, it would be a slow and strenuous process as talks of reparation were already being raised.
Lekla and Toksi requested permission to visit Khepri. They had never seen a world where so many different sentient species intermingled peacefully. To our general shock, it was Varnog that insisted we allow it when the rest of our leaders expressed extreme reluctance.
Shuria and her sisters tagged along. While they weren’t allowed anywhere sensitive, they got a good sense about life in our world and spent quite a bit of time with the Mimics. Lanam and Serida remained on Khepri to start their new life among their people, but Shuria chose to return—at least for the time being—to Xerath’s side.