"Leander, seriously, don't blink. We're getting out of here before that thing decides we look like a Vitamin C supplement," Jason muttered, his voice cracking with a pilot's survival instinct.
But Leander Hayes wasn't listening. His new senses—sharpened by the Space Stone and hummed into a frenzy by the proximity of such massive, metallic energy—were screaming at him. There was a pull here, a gravity that wasn't just physics.
"Hang on a second," Leander said softly. "I need to see something."
"Wait, what? See what? Leander—"
Before Jason could finish his protest, a pale blue mist erupted from Leander's skin, swirling like a localized nebula. In less than a second, the light condensed into a single, piercing point of sapphire radiance and vanished.
Jason stared at the empty seat, his mouth hanging open. He reached out, swatting at the air where Leander had just been sitting, half-expecting a cloaking device to ripple. Nothing. The kid was gone. Not moved, not hidden—gone. Jason's lips twitched as he stared at the airlock, but the sensors showed no breach.
"What kind of monster did I pick up?" Jason whispered to the empty cockpit.
On the Back of the Red Whale
The transition was instantaneous. One moment, Leander was in a recycled-air cabin; the next, he was standing in the raw, silent majesty of the void.
He didn't drift away. The Red Whale was so massive that it generated its own localized gravity field, pulling Leander firmly against its "skin." Beneath his boots, the surface felt like a sun-scorched wasteland. The dark, black-grey hide was riddled with deep, jagged cracks, resembling a desert floor that hadn't seen rain in a billion years. Some of the fissures were wide enough for Leander to drop his entire arm into.
He knelt, running a hand over the rough texture. It was metal—but not any alloy known to Earth or even the Xandarian databases he'd glanced at. It was cold, ancient, and impossibly dense.
Leander focused. He reached out with his Metal Control, his fingers curling as he tugged at a jagged outcropping. Usually, metal obeyed him like liquid; here, he felt a stubborn resistance. He grunted, his veins pulsing with a golden light as he forced his will into the hide.
Snap.
A chunk of the "skin" the size of a human head broke off and floated into his palm. It was a pale, silver-grey ore, heavier than lead and tougher than diamond. As he tried to knead it with his power, he realized it was even more resilient than Vibranium. It didn't flow; it fought.
"Tougher than the stuff in Wakanda," Leander murmured, his eyes widening. He managed to force it into a long, wicked spike. With a flick of his wrist, he launched it. The spike hissed through the void, slamming back into the Whale's hide a few hundred meters away. It buried itself halfway, the tip deforming only slightly upon impact.
Leander stood up and blurred forward, his boots clicking against the metallic plains. He reached the center of the red light he'd seen from the ship. It wasn't a glowing wound; it was a ten-meter-wide plate of polished, translucent metal, as smooth as a mirror. The red light pulsing beneath it was pure, rhythmic, and strangely mechanical. It looked less like an organ and more like a status indicator on a massive machine.
"Are you even a ghost in a machine, or just a very big rock?" Leander wondered aloud.
He didn't wait for an answer. He snapped his Nirvana Wings open. The purple-gold feathers were now interlaced with veins of brilliant blue light, the Space Stone on his back glowing like a pilot light for the universe. Space itself seemed to ripple and shimmer at the sharp edges of his wings as he took flight.
He soared over the vast landscape of the creature's spine, reaching the head in seconds. He banked hard, flying out in front of the beast, then turned to match its speed so he could look it in the eye.
He was expecting a mindless monster. What he saw was... disconcerting.
The Red Whale's mouth was a massive, sealed seam of obsidian. Its eyes, each the size of a luxury villa, were golden orbs that looked like they had been turned on a celestial lathe. There was no wildness in them, no predatory hunger. They were calm. Almost... cute, in a terrifyingly gargantuan way.
As Leander hovered there, a tiny speck of gold against the black of the void, the whale's golden pupils slowly rotated. It saw him.
The creature didn't slow down. To the whale, Leander was probably smaller than a speck of dust—too tiny to eat, too insignificant to acknowledge.
Leander felt a surge of playful defiance. "Let's see how much weight you're really carrying."
He thrust his hands forward, his Metal Control expanding to its absolute limit. He didn't just grab a piece of the whale; he tried to seize the entire three-kilometer structure. His muscles bunched, his golden skin glowing with a blinding intensity, and the veins on his forehead throbbed as he pushed against the momentum of the beast.
He wasn't trying to move it; he was trying to stop it.
The Red Whale suddenly lurched. For the first time in perhaps centuries, the creature's forward momentum was arrested by an outside force. Panic—pure, primal terror—flashed in those massive golden eyes.
The beast began to thrash. A creature of this size moving violently in a planetary atmosphere would have leveled continents and triggered tectonic shifts. Even in space, the vibration was enough to make Leander's teeth rattle.
Leander's eyes flared with a matching golden light. He gritted his teeth, his hands locked in the air as if he were holding back a falling moon. "Settle down!"
The whale's head remained frozen by Leander's will, but the red light on its back suddenly shifted to a brilliant, angry gold. A familiar energy gathered at the center of its forehead.
VRRRRRRR—
A golden beam of light, thirty meters wide, erupted from the whale's brow, surging toward Leander. He flapped his wings, banking left with a sharp crack of spatial distortion, easily dodging the ray. His instincts, sharpened by the Space Stone, told him that while the beam was powerful enough to metallize a fleet, his own body's frequency was now too high for it to touch him.
Leander didn't retaliate with violence. Instead, he hovered directly above the creature's forehead and fired his own Metal-Transmutation Rays from his eyes.
The golden beams struck the whale's brow, not to harm it, but to rewrite it. He began to soften the black-grey metal, transmuting it into a slightly lower-grade alloy that was more receptive to his mental energy.
The confusion in the whale's eyes was visible. The terror began to drain away, replaced by a strange, quiet fascination. The golden beam on its forehead flickered, shrank, and eventually vanished.
Leander retracted his rays. He could feel the whale's struggle weakening. It wasn't giving up out of exhaustion; it was giving up out of curiosity. The section of its forehead Leander had transmuted began to ripple, the creature's own biological systems repairing the "inferior" metal and returning it to its indestructible state in seconds.
Leander slowly opened his hands, releasing the invisible grip he had on the beast's frame.
The whale drifted for a moment, then pulsed a faint golden light from its back. Leander felt it immediately—a resonance. It was the same frequency as his Golden Light, a warm, humming intimacy that vibrated in his marrow. It was like finding a distant, much larger cousin in a crowd of strangers.