Chapter 296 — No Demon Should Exist
The words were still hanging in the air when it happened.
"Alien filth."
No warning followed them. No battle cry. No charge. No visible buildup. One moment Gaius stood motionless amidst the wreckage of the launch pod. The next, something invisible swept through the corridor.
It was not plasma. It was not sound. It was not anything Covenant sensors could identify.
It was will.
The nearest Unggoy collapsed instantly, weapons slipping from limp hands, bodies striking the deck, unconscious before they even understood what was happening. Several Kig-Yar staggered. Two fell where they stood. Another stumbled backward into a bulkhead, breathing hard, panic overwhelming him before he even knew what he was panicking about.
Even the Jiralhanae felt it. One growled low in his throat and dropped to a knee. Another took an involuntary step backward. A third gripped his weapon tighter, fighting against an instinct he couldn't name and didn't understand.
The Sangheili remained standing.
Barely.
Their training held them up. Their discipline. Their warrior's pride. Sangheili were not weak-minded, they had crossed blades with Demons, faced Hunters in close combat, charged into engagements that would have broken lesser species without hesitation. But what pressed against their minds now was not fear in any form they recognized. It was not intimidation. It was the crushing weight of a will forged across centuries of unending war, a will that had endured horrors beyond mortal comprehension and come out the other side unbroken.
Even their discipline strained beneath it.
Every one of them felt it. A pressure. A presence. Something in the marrow of their bones telling them they stood before a predator so far beyond themselves that resistance itself was almost an insult to whatever they were facing.
The corridor fell silent. Only the flickering emergency lights remained, casting long shadows across bodies that had stopped moving.
Then Gaius took a step forward.
Thud.
The nearest Sangheili tightened his grip on his plasma rifle.
Thud.
Another step. The warrior tried to raise the weapon. Tried to aim. Tried to simply move his own arm. His body refused every command his mind gave it. Fear had reduced him to a statue, helpless but fully aware.
Gaius stopped directly in front of him.
The Sangheili stared upward, and kept staring upward, because the giant standing before him didn't seem to end, golden armor catching the strobing emergency light, Power Fists hanging loose at his sides, the Iron Halo drifting silently behind his helm.
For one brief, clear moment, the Sangheili understood exactly what was about to happen to him.
Gaius raised one hand. Not a fist. Not a strike. Almost casually, the way a man might wave off something merely inconvenient.
Then he moved.
The motion was too fast for the Sangheili to see. A single backhand, and the sound of it cracked through the corridor like a cannon discharge. His shields failed and vanished in the same instant they ignited. His head simply ceased to exist, armor, bone, flesh, all of it gone in a single beat of silence. His body remained upright for a fraction of a second longer, as if it hadn't yet received the news, before it folded to the deck.
Nobody moved. The surviving Covenant simply stared, unable to process what they had just watched happen in less time than it took to blink.
To Gaius, it had been no different than brushing aside an insect.
He turned his gaze toward the rest of them. The red gems set into the knuckles of his Power Fists brightened, and a low mechanical growl rolled through the corridor as their disruption fields spun up to full power.
In the same breath, the invisible weight pressing down on every Covenant soldier in that corridor simply lifted, released deliberately, not because it had run its course, but because Gaius wanted what came next.
He hadn't come here to watch them collapse. He'd come to make them understand exactly what they were facing, and understanding required them to still be standing when it happened.
Freed from the paralysis, the survivors opened fire on pure instinct.
Plasma bolts filled the corridor in a storm of blue light, splashing uselessly across Auramite plating that didn't so much as scorch beneath them.
Gaius moved.
The first Jiralhanae charged, a mistake born of desperation more than judgment. Gaius met him head-on, and his Power Fist struck the Brute square in the chest. The shield lasted less than a fraction of a second before it flashed and collapsed, and the armor beneath it simply gave way, the entire torso caving inward beneath the impact.
The corpse was flung backward into a cluster of Unggoy, crushing them against the corridor wall in a single motion.
A Sangheili lunged with an ignited energy sword. The blade never reached him. Gaius caught the warrior by the throat, lifted him clean off the deck, and drove his Power Fist through the center of his chest.
The Sangheili's shields flared brilliantly for a heartbeat before failing entirely, and the body went limp in his grip. Gaius let the corpse fall without so much as glancing at it.
Another Sangheili kept firing, backing away as he did, plasma bolt after plasma bolt streaking down the corridor. Gaius simply walked through the barrage as though it were rain. One swing of the Power Fist ended it, the Sangheili vanished beneath the blow, armor shattering, bone fragmenting, the deck plating beneath him cracking from the sheer force transferred into it.
The fight ended almost as quickly as it had begun.
Bodies littered the corridor. Discarded plasma weapons still burned where they'd fallen. Smoke curled from bulkheads scarred by stray fire. And at the center of all of it stood Gaius, alone, untouched, exactly as he had been before the first shot was fired.
The Iron Jetpack on his back roared to life, blue-white exhaust flooding the corridor with light. Without hesitation, he launched forward, accelerating down the passageway like a missile, driving deeper into the flagship.
Toward its heart.
On the bridge, silence had already taken hold. Every officer present had watched the engagement unfold through the internal security feeds, and every one of them had seen the same thing: the frozen final image still hovering above the tactical display, a giant in golden armor, standing untouched amid a corridor of Covenant dead.
One Sangheili officer found his hand gripping the edge of his console before he consciously realized it. Decades of discipline weren't enough to stop the words from escaping.
"A Demon..."
Silence answered him.
Then another officer slowly shook his head, his eyes never leaving the image.
"No."
His voice carried more uncertainty than conviction.
"I have fought Demons before."
He gestured toward the frozen frame.
"They are not this large."
"They are not this strong."
A third officer gave a slow nod.
"Demons survive impossible odds."
"But they do not breach warship shields."
"They do not carve through an entire security forces alone."
Another spoke, quieter than the rest.
"The Demons are dangerous."
His gaze remained fixed on the giant figure.
"But this..."
He paused, unable to find better words.
"This is something else."
The bridge fell quiet again, because every officer present had arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion. Whatever had boarded their flagship, it was not a Demon, not the kind they knew, not the kind they'd trained a lifetime to fight. And yet it had come from the humans. Which meant, somehow, impossibly, it was one of them.
The thought unsettled them more than any of them wanted to admit.
One of the Jiralhanae bodyguards finally growled the question hanging over the entire bridge. "Then what is it?"
No one answered. No one had an answer to give.
Every eye slowly turned toward the Fleetmaster.
He hadn't moved. His expression remained as controlled as ever, but behind that calm exterior his thoughts were racing far faster than his posture let on. This was not a bomb. Not a boarding team. Not even a Demon.
The humans had launched something else entirely into his flagship, a monster now cutting through his forces with a speed and ease that defied every tactical assumption he'd built his career on.
His gaze stayed locked on the display.
Finally, he spoke. "Seal every route leading toward the bridge."
The silence shattered instantly.
Officers rushed to carry out the orders.
"Seal every corridor."
"Send more security teams."
"Deploy additional Sangheili warriors."
"Recall nearby Jiralhanae units."
"Activate all internal defenses."
The orders spread through the flagship in seconds. The Fleetmaster kept watching the frozen image, and for the first time since arriving at Cascade, he found himself no longer thinking about the battle for the planet below.
He was thinking only about the thing moving through his ship, and how to stop it before it reached him.
What he didn't know was that every order he'd just given had already been rendered meaningless.
Gaius already knew exactly where he was.
Far below the bridge, the giant continued his advance. The Iron Jetpack roared behind him, blue-white exhaust lighting corridor after corridor as he tore through the vessel.
He didn't move like an infantryman clearing a ship room by room. He moved like a projectile, a wall of Auramite and momentum that nothing aboard had been built to stop.
His Observation Haki stretched outward through the flagship, brushing against hundreds, then thousands, of life signatures. Most of them meant nothing to him, crew, laborers, minor personnel scattered throughout the ship's lower decks, and he let them pass through his awareness without a second thought. What held his attention was a single concentration near the vessel's center: officers, guards, command staff, all gathered in one place.
The bridge.
He hadn't needed the Haki to know that. Centuries of warfare had already taught him where a command center would sit on a ship built like this one. The Haki only confirmed what instinct had already told him.
He adjusted course and accelerated.
The first Kig-Yar security detail tried to stop him, their oval point-defense shields flaring to life as they formed a hasty line across the corridor. It accomplished nothing.
Gaius didn't slow. The Iron Halo pulsed behind him, casting a faint oval shield around his already massive frame, and he simply drove forward through the formation. The first shield shattered. The Kig-Yar behind it vanished.
The second followed. Then the third. Bodies struck the walls, armor crumpled, blood splattered across the bulkheads, and the entire detail ceased to exist in less time than it took to register the attempt.
He continued on without breaking stride.
Further ahead, Covenant troops had already begun fortifying key intersections. Plasma fire filled the corridors alongside needler rounds, grenades, and fuel rod projectiles, the barrage lighting the ship's interior in flashes of blue, green, and violet.
Most of it detonated harmlessly against the Iron Halo before it ever reached him. What little got through burst against the corridor walls around him, its force absorbed and scattered before it could do anything meaningful.
None of it slowed him down even slightly. He pushed through the storm the way a warship sails through rain, indifferent to it, untouched by it. More Covenant died. Some fought. Some fled. Neither choice changed the outcome.
The distance between Gaius and the bridge kept shrinking. Rapidly.
He turned one corner, then another, his route shifting constantly, not because he was lost, but because he was simply following the fastest path his senses revealed to him with every step.
Ahead, a massive blast door slammed shut, layer after layer of armored metal sliding into place as energy barriers hummed to life across its surface. The Covenant had begun locking down entire sections of the ship in a desperate bid to slow him. For an ordinary boarding force, it would have been a formidable obstacle.
For Gaius, it was simply another door.
He didn't slow. His Power Fist activated, the red gems in its knuckles flaring bright as the disruption field roared to life around it. He punched, and the shield barrier collapsed instantly. The metal followed a fraction of a second later, matter destabilizing beneath the field's energy until armor plating, structural supports, and reinforced bulkheads alike turned to twisted, glowing debris.
The blast door simply stopped existing. The force of the strike sent a tremor rippling through the entire ship, warning lights flickered across the bridge itself, several displays distorting for a moment before stabilizing again.
Gaius walked through the hole he'd made, leaving behind an opening wide enough to drive a vehicle through.
The bridge went silent again. Every officer present had watched it happen, the shield, the blast door, the reinforced armor behind it, all of it undone by a single strike. For several seconds, nobody spoke at all.
One officer finally looked down at his console as the security feeds updated. The giant hadn't slowed. Hadn't stopped. The door that should have delayed him for minutes had cost him less than a second.
A Sangheili officer tightened his grip on the edge of his station. "Another security team is gone." No one answered him.
The tactical display updated once more. The marker representing the intruder had moved closer still, still heading directly for the bridge.
A younger officer finally broke the silence. "How does he know where we are?"
Nobody answered, because every officer on that bridge had already begun asking themselves the same question. The flagship held thousands of compartments, hundreds of corridors, entire sections dedicated to command and support functions scattered throughout its structure.
And yet the giant had never once taken a wrong turn. Never hesitated. Never doubled back. He moved through the ship as though he'd already memorized its schematics before he'd ever set foot, or, more accurately, his fist, through its hull.
Another report came in. "The door to Section Twenty-One has been destroyed."
A pause.
Then another. "The door to Section Twenty-Two has been destroyed."
The officer delivering the report lowered his head slightly. "He is moving through every obstacle we put in front of him."
The bridge went quiet again. Even the Jiralhanae bodyguards had stopped growling, their eyes fixed on the displays, watching, waiting.
The tactical marker moved again. Closer.
One officer swallowed hard.
"The monster is coming directly for us."
Nobody corrected him this time, because the word no longer felt like an exaggeration.
Another Sangheili stared at the display, his mandibles tightening.
"He should not exist."
The words left him before he realized he'd spoken them aloud.
A second officer gave a slow nod.
"No Demon should be capable of this."
The Fleetmaster said nothing. But even he was no longer entirely unreadable. The calm certainty he'd carried since first entering the system had quietly slipped away, replaced by something he rarely allowed himself to feel, not panic, not fear, but genuine concern.
The kind only a seasoned Fleetmaster feels when he finally encounters something he has no framework to understand.
His gaze remained fixed on the advancing marker. The giant was no longer merely inside his ship. He was hunting. And every report reaching the bridge said the same thing: there was nothing left aboard capable of stopping him.
The Fleetmaster rose slowly from his command throne. The movement alone drew every eye in the chamber toward him, and the bridge straightened at once, discipline reasserting itself, at least in part.
He ignited his energy sword. Blue light spread across the chamber, its low hum cutting cleanly through the tension that had settled over everyone present.
"If he seeks the bridge," he said, his voice carrying to every corner of the room, "then eventually, he will find it."
The officers turned toward him, waiting.
The Fleetmaster turned his gaze back to the tactical display, watching the marker close the distance step by step, and said nothing more.
~~~
Enjoying the story?
Want more chapters, bonus content, and a chance to help this world continue growing?
Join me on Patreon:
patreon.com/ZanderLee
Every bit of support helps me keep writing and releasing chapters faster. Thank you!