CHAPTER 5 — AFTERMATH
There's a flavor to the end of the world nobody ever talks about. Not the metallic tang of blood, not the scorched pork of burning man-meat, not even the ozone stink of overcooked chaos energy. It's the absence—when the noise stops and all that's left is the static, and you realize you're still breathing in a place that should've killed you. That's the taste on Khaos's tongue as he stands at the lip of Grine's ruined fortress, watching the apocalypse cool on the horizon.
The city is a smear of molten glass and shadows, skyline melted down to toothpicks, every street a vein running lava back to the heart. Above, the sky is a clot of red and black, only occasionally ripped open by the white-hot streak of a doomed satellite trying to leave orbit before the planet drags it down. There's no wind, just a slow-moving front of bone dust and smoke, spreading out in every direction until even the stars give up and close their eyes.
Khaos stands still. He's got no clever line, no punchline left to drop. His armor is fused to his skin in places, purple-black chaos energy flickering where blood should be. He can taste metal in his spit, and his left eye keeps skipping, as if his HUD's trying to buffer the last ten minutes and can't get past the buffering wheel.
At his side, DragonFire is hunched over, breathing ragged. She's lost most of her shirt—what's left is clinging to her like a war crime—and her dragon tattoo is loose, crawling up and down her back like it's looking for a way out. Her arms are striped in blood, not all of it hers, and she keeps blinking hard, trying to focus. The two of them look like the before-and-after in an ad for existential dread.
For a while they just stand there, letting the world crack and bleed around them.
DF wipes at her mouth, smearing a line of ash and plasma across her chin. The dragon paces over her collarbone, head up, tail lashing, scales flickering between gold and burnt orange. She tries to talk, but all that comes out is a sound like a spark plug misfiring.
Khaos glances at her, then back at the carnage. "You ever get the feeling we didn't actually win?"
DF laughs—one wet, broken cough—and wipes her face again. "If that's winning, I'd hate to see a tie."
The ground below the fortress is cracked open, rivers of fire leaking out and running in patterns that make Khaos's chaos core itch. There's bodies everywhere, but none of them are moving. The mutant horde is finished, shredded and then re-shredded by the last act of Grine's nightmare. In the smoking ruins of the city, the only things left alive are the scavengers, picking at the dead like it's Black Friday and everything's half off.
He looks at DF, really looks. She's trembling, but she's not hiding it. The dragon's eyes meet his, and for a second, he gets a flash of what she's feeling: terror, rage, and something else—grief, maybe, or the hollow where it should be. He remembers her in the birth lab, pinned under Grine's thumb, eyes rolling back. She doesn't scare easy, but this got to her.
He puts a hand on her shoulder. It's awkward—he's not good at this shit—but he leaves it there, waiting for her to shake it off or punch him. She does neither.
"I thought that was the end," she mutters. "When he—when I was under, I saw it. Every bad thing I ever did, every person I ever burned. They were all screaming for me."
Khaos nods. "Same. But mine were rooting for me, which is somehow worse."
They stand in silence. Then DF looks at him, and her eyes are the color of burned-out neon.
"Promise me," she says, low, "if I ever end up like him—if I start growing heads, or eating babies, or whatever—promise you'll put me down."
He grins. "If you go full kaiju, I'm riding you into the sunset first. Then I'll pull the trigger."
She cracks a smile, just barely. The dragon settles, curling around her bicep, and the flames on her skin die down to embers.
Khaos steps to the edge of the platform and surveys the ruined world. "Bet you thought that was the final boss," he says, voice raised to the dead sky, and maybe to whoever's still listening. "Nah. That was level one. Welcome to the deep end."
DF laughs again, less broken this time, and spits over the edge. "What's next, then? You think there's even a next?"
He flicks his HUD to life, just to prove he can. The display jitters, but spits out a report:
CHAOS ENERGY: 50%
DRAGON: 40%
BLASTERS: 0% (REALLY?)
KILL COUNT: [UNDEFINED]
MOOD: N/A
Khaos wipes his hand down his face, leaves a stripe of blackened blood. "We recharge. We heal. Then we see if the universe has anything left worth breaking."
DF leans on him, just for a second, and together they watch the last of the fortress cave in on itself, the ribcage collapsing into a crater of light and noise. The city below is just a memory, and above them, the sky is finally clear.
For now.
Night on a dead world isn't all that different from day—same busted skyline, same reek, same taste of victory trying to curdle into regret. But Khaos and DragonFire set up camp anyway, because that's what you do when the adrenaline drains out and your limbs start to shake for real.
They find a spot inside the hollowed-out hull of a burnt crawler tank, walls still warm from the last plasma strike, roof open to the purple-bloody sky. The city's gone silent, except for the occasional distant crash as the rest of the fortress falls into itself. It's almost peaceful, if you ignore the charred ribs and mutant limbs sticking out of the ground.
Khaos peels off his armor, drops it with a wet slap, and sits against the wall. His skin is a roadmap of trauma—burns, cuts, one chunk on his thigh where the bone's showing through just enough to catch the moonlight. He ignores it. He's more interested in the bottle he scavenged from a looted commissary two blocks over.
He pops the cap, sniffs, then hands it to DF. "Not poison, but I wouldn't let it touch bare metal."
DF takes a long pull, wipes her mouth, and passes it back. She's cleaned up, but her face is streaked with blood, and the dragon tattoo is moving slow now, like it's limping. She flexes her hands, watching the scales shift, then leans back and stares at the sky.
For a minute, neither says anything. It's not awkward. It's just…needed.
Eventually, Khaos says, "You ever think about quitting? Like, for real?"
DF blinks, caught off guard. "Quitting what?"
He waves at the ruins. "All of it. Running, fighting. Waking up every day knowing you're the only thing standing between the world and whatever's worse than you."
DF doesn't answer right away. She takes another drink, rolls it in her mouth like she's sampling the notes. "Sometimes I think about letting go," she says, "but then I remember what's waiting if I do. There's always another Grine. Another asshole ready to turn the whole universe into a meat grinder."
Khaos laughs, but it's hollow. "You ever see their faces? The ones we put down?"
DF shrugs. "I used to count. Now I just try to keep up."
He looks at his hands, flexes them, remembers how it felt to punch through Grine's chest, how the faces screamed all the way down. "In the throne room, I saw every head I ever took off. Every kid in the pits. It's like they were waiting for me."
DF studies him, silent. It's the first time he's let the cracks show, and she doesn't know whether to respect it or call him out.
He drinks, then says, "You remember the pit, second district? That little kid, six arms, black eyes? She followed me for like three blocks. Didn't ask for help. Just kept looking."
DF nods, tight. "She's dead, you know."
"Yeah," he says. "I know."
Another silence. This one bites deeper.
DF looks down at her lap, fingers interlaced. The dragon's tail curls around her wrist, squeezes. "When Grine slammed me in the lab, I thought I was gone. Not just dead, but erased—like he was gonna eat me so hard there'd be nothing left to even remember I existed."
Khaos looks over, and her face is hard, but her eyes are glassy. "You ever get scared?" she asks, voice low.
"Every day," he admits. "But it's easier when I know there's someone crazier than me out there, setting the bar."
She almost laughs, but it comes out a snort. "You think I'm crazier?"
He leans in, mock conspiratorial. "I know you are."
She smiles, small but real. The dragon perks up, just a little.
They sit like that for a while, trading the bottle, letting the silence grow comfortable. Khaos can feel the ghosts in the room, but for once, they're not screaming at him. Maybe they're curious, or maybe they're waiting to see if he'll finally break.
He glances at DF. "You ever think maybe we're the bad guys?"
DF considers. "If we are, at least we're honest about it."
He raises the bottle. "To honesty, then."
She clinks her flask against his. "And to making sure nobody else gets to wear the crown."
They drink. Khaos leans his head back and closes his eyes, letting the warmth burn through the exhaustion.
After a while, he looks straight at the reader, grins crooked. "Yeah, I'm spilling guts. Don't get used to it."
And for a second, the night almost feels safe.
Dawn's barely made a dent when Khaos and DragonFire break camp and limp their way back to the Dragon of Khaos. The ship is still intact, paint scorched and hull pitted from last night's fun, but the cockpit is home. It smells like ionized air, blood, and whatever passes for old coffee in this sector.
DF slumps into the co-pilot seat, legs propped on the dash, head tilted back and eyes closed. The dragon tattoo is docile, scales barely moving, as if even the beast is nursing a hangover.
Khaos flicks the power, and the dashboard explodes to life, every system running its own trauma check. The chaos core pulses along with his heartbeat, and he grins as the HUD coughs up the next status report:
DAMAGE: 31% (NICE)
CHAOS ENERGY: 54%
DRAGON: 41%
BLASTERS: 4% (RECHARGING SLOW)
MISSION: ......….
He leans back, lets the chair cradle him, and for the first time in forever, he allows himself to feel something like contentment. It lasts maybe half a minute before DF says, "We got a ping."
Khaos brings up the nav overlay. There it is: a system-wide broadcast, tight-beam encrypted, bouncing off every relay node in the quadrant. He grunts. "That's military grade. Someone's showing off."
DF cracks one eye. "You wanna play it safe?"
He shrugs. "Safe is for people who want to live forever."
She snorts, but there's no heat in it.
The two of them watch as the ship's AI decrypts the message, running it through filters and mood analysis before spitting it onto the main screen.
First, the planet: on the surface, it's a paradise. Oceans like blue glass, cities shining silver, whole continents of green. The ad copy practically writes itself—welcome to Nova Eden, population four billion, no crime, no hunger, no war. Khaos almost gags.
He squints, dials up the sensors, and peels back the top layer. It's a skin job. The cities are real, but underneath, there's a web of power lines, holding tanks, and heat blooms that don't match civilian patterns. Every luxury block is built over a blacksite, every playground sits on top of a labor pit.
DF sits up. "See that?" She zooms in, overlays the deep scan. "The numbers don't add up."
Khaos follows her finger: buried under every major metro, there's a ratio of ten to one—ten shadow presences for every citizen up top. He switches to thermal, and the image is a cancer of hot spots, each one moving in perfect sync.
DF says, "Someone's running a slave grid."
Khaos narrows his eyes. "Not just any someone. This is state-level. Top-down."
He zooms further. The scanner shows layered security: kill drones, suppression teams, crowd control with real-time gene scanning. Every human in the city is tagged, tracked, and scored. The lowest get recycled. The highest…well, they never leave the penthouses.
He lets the scan run deeper, and the HUD flares red as it hits the inner sanctums. There are chambers even the city's rulers don't access directly. "Rape factories," the AI mutters, voice flat and cold. "Population renewal optimized for maximum compliance."
DF's mouth is a thin line. "Who the fuck designs this?"
Khaos blinks. "You wanna meet him?"
He pulls up the next file: a security feed, maybe a week old, shot from inside a boardroom built out of glass and sorrow. The villain is on screen, and Khaos knows at a glance it's not a random tyrant. It's the Enslaver Dictator.
He's old, but you can't tell what parts are original. The eyes are diamond-bright, skin pulled tight over a scaffolding of gold and carbon. The hands are gloves of some tech-metal, fingers moving faster than thought as he types or manipulates a floating feed. Voice like a virus: smooth, quiet, every word pre-meditated murder.
Khaos reads the file. "Ex-general. Used to run black-ops, went freelance when the state failed. Now he's privatized misery."
DF watches the feed, her knuckles white on the dash. "He's got a hive-mind. See the implants?" She points at the little black disks embedded in the skulls of his henchmen, barely visible even on close-up. "They're wired to his thoughts. He feels what they feel."
Khaos checks the meta-data: every year, the Dictator swaps out his lieutenants, absorbs their powers, then slaughters the old guard to keep the hierarchy lean. He's efficient, but not cold—he enjoys the work, takes pride in it. Khaos can see it in his eyes.
He watches another feed: the Dictator walks through a crowd of prisoners, all kneeling, all silent. He doesn't speak. He just looks at each one, and they shudder, then collapse. He's got some kind of psi tech, maybe, or just the force of a man who's never been told no.
Khaos feels his stomach twist. He recognizes this world. The rules are different, but the script is the same as every hellhole that ever made him.
He kills the feed, lets the screen go dark.
DF says, "You wanna hit this one, or should we just glass the surface and call it even?"
Khaos doesn't answer right away. He stares at the darkness, thinking about the kids in the pit, the faces on Grine's chest, all the lives chewed up and spit out by assholes who thought they'd live forever.
He turns to DF. "We're not saving anyone. Not really. But if we can make the Dictator choke on his own blood? Maybe it's worth the flight."
She looks at him, and for the first time today, there's real fire in her eyes.
He breaks the fourth wall. "Fuck it. We torchin' this one too."
DF grins. "You really don't get tired, do you?"
He powers up the engines, and the ship groans, eager to get off this haunted rock and find the next mistake to make.
The HUD flickers, then flashes a new mission:
OBJECTIVE: OVERTHROW THE ENSLAVER DICTATOR
LOCATION: NOVA EDEN
REWARD: WHO CARES
Khaos grins at the screen, and you can tell he means it.
See you there.