Kane didn't just kill the three-eyed scavenger. He reached into the man's broken chest-plate, grabbed the pulsing Mini-Reactor keeping his suit pressurized, and ripped it out like a mechanical heart.
The scavenger collapsed, gasping as the thin, purple atmosphere of the Lanes turned his lungs to ice.
"Vance, Sully, Doc—get to that ship," Kane ordered. His voice was a low vibration that made the glass floor hum. "Don't board it. Just clear the deck."
"What are you doing, Sarge?" Vance asked, his Asteroid Juggernaut fists sparking with molten gold.
"I'm sending a message," Kane said. He looked at the Mini-Reactor in his hand. It was a Tier-7 power source, dense and glowing with a sterile blue light. "He said the Consortium owns this sector. I think it's time for a change in management."
Kane didn't eat the reactor. He crushed it.
[WARNING: HIGH-DENSITY MANA OVERLOAD]
[INTEGRATING... TECH-VORE PROTOCOL...]
[OUTPUT: 400% CAPACITY]
Kane's shadow exploded. It didn't just darken the ground; it rose up like a tidal wave of ink and obsidian, swallowing the purple mist for miles. His Void-Lord Regalia began to melt and reform, jagged shards of the scavenger's polymer armor stitching into his black plate.
"Sully! Give me a target!" Kane roared.
Sully's black eyes flared. "Three more scouts! Coming in fast from the dark side of the obsidian moon! They've got heavy railguns—"
"Perfect," Kane hissed.
He didn't run. He launched. The glass floor shattered behind him as he became a streak of black-and-blue lightning. He met the first scout ship—a fifty-foot jagged wedge of chrome—head-on in mid-air.
The ship fired. A slug of solid tungsten, moving at Mach 5, slammed into Kane's chest.
[VITALITY: 88%]
[KINETIC ENERGY ABSORBED]
Kane didn't bounce off. He caught the slug. He felt his ribs crack and his armor shatter, but the Void-Hunger turned the impact into raw fuel. He slammed his dual axes into the ship's cockpit, tearing through the reinforced glass like wet paper.
"Who's harvesting who?!" Kane screamed into the face of the terrified pilot.
He didn't kill the pilot with his blades. He unleashed a Void-Pulse directly into the ship's fuel line.
The Fire in the Vacuum
The explosion was beautiful. A sphere of violet fire expanded in the silence of the Scavenger Lanes, lighting up the "bubbles" of a dozen different worlds.
Down on the glass plains, Vance wasn't sitting idle. He grabbed a massive shard of the broken moon—a piece of obsidian the size of a house—and hurled it into the sky. It caught the second scout ship in the belly, folding it in half like a tin can.
"Doc! Hit the engines!" Vance yelled.
Doc didn't use a gun. She raised her hands, and a cloud of Life-Eater Spores—now empowered by the Seed of Earth—swarmed the third ship. The spores didn't just rot the pilots; they ate the software. The ship's lights turned a sickly emerald green as the onboard AI began to scream in binary, its "organs" dissolving into rust.
"The ship is ours, Sarge!" Sully shouted, her voice echoing through their mental link.
Kane stood on the burning wreckage of the first scout, his armor glowing with the heat of the explosion. In the distance, a massive structure—a Consortium Relay Station—began to rotate, its long-range sensors finally locking onto the "glitch" in their sector.
"Sully, can you hack their comms?" Kane asked, landing back on the deck next to his squad.
"I can broadcast," she said, her fingers dancing through a holographic interface she'd hijacked from the dead scavenger. "But everyone in the sector will hear it. Every pirate, every merchant, every God-King."
"Good," Kane said. He stepped up to the terminal, his silver eyes burning with a cold, terrifying light. He didn't look like a Ranger anymore. He looked like the end of an era.
"Attention, Consortium," Kane's voice boomed through the Scavenger Lanes, vibrating in the cockpits of a thousand ships. "My name is Kane. I'm from Earth. You've been harvesting our souls for ten thousand years. Consider this your final notice."
He looked at the camera, a jagged smile on his face.
"The Harvest is over. The Feeding has begun."