“Do you have enough Essence left to fight them if needed? Or did I drain you?”
Plausious stood and raised his booted left foot and mentally ordered the material to shift, showing the obscured green gem hidden in the material.
“I didn’t use it against you, and I am not depleted.”
“Neat. Never need one myself, but I’m always charging them for others. I still don’t think taking him in with you is a good idea.”
“If they harm him they will die,” Plausious said firmly.
“They are also under my protection,” Jasmyn warned.
“I am relieving you of them, and as of now they are my responsibility.”
“Only if they follow you. You’ve been exiled, remember? To them you’re not the Reignor. There is another.”
“There can only be one, and so long as I live and do not abdicate, I am the Reignor.”
“Well, I’m cheering for you,” she said, throwing her arms to the sides carelessly. “I’m just not hopeful.”
“Take me to them now, and you’ll see what true power is.”
“If you’d said ‘real power’ then I was gonna offer you a magazine,” she said, turning abruptly and walking past him towards the door. “Follow me.”
5
Kelmaran had been a prisoner of Star Force for 829 years, and he had no one to blame except himself. He’d been sent into Installation 392 to covertly sabotage Star Force’s control of the Temple, only to fail when the troops they had guarding it put up more of a fight than he expected. He still killed them all and deactivated the Caretaker programing overrides, returning the new units to default and logging Star Force as an enemy, but he had spent too much time doing it and had failed to flee in time before reinforcements arrived.
Those reinforcements had an Archon with them, and the Archon knew how to use Essence. He wasn’t very strong, but he played a stalling game until a third set of reinforcements arrived…and they were wearing armor that could absorb Essence. The Neofan had no idea Star Force possessed such technology, and Kelmaran not only could not defeat them, but once they had the advantage they rushed him and quickly rendered him unconscious.
He woke up in a makeshift holding facility made entirely of energy shields with the emitters far from him and covered in the same armor, with gradually more Neofan joining him in it. Then one day a warship flew overhead their position and fired down on all of them in a barrage that left them unconscious until they arrived here, in this prison, along with Neofan from every other war mission that failed to fully succeed across all the Temples.
He’d learned from those that came later of the many successes, but the reluctance of all the Vargemma to rise up and do their duty was both repulsive and took any hope of reclaiming the Temples away from the Neofan. House Atriark had been confident in their victory, but now Kelmaran and 5291 other Neofan were trapped here with no way out.
He wasn’t sure if they were the lucky ones or not, for some Neofan had died in combat against Star Force when Star Force didn’t have a significant advantage. It seemed their policy of not killing in combat had its limits, and the arrogant little empire had succeeded in ending the life of many preborn over a million years old. Such a waste, but now he wondered if his life too was being wasted, for if he was never to leave this place then he might as well die now and get it over with.
The others had tried many times to escape, but what little progress they made was always thwarted. First by their technology, and after the Neofan learned the bounds of what it could and could not do, the red tails stopped them personally.
All Nuv’ernor were supposed to be under the possession of the ruling House for just this reason. They were too powerful to be allowed even a limited amount of freedom, but the Neofan did not rule in this galaxy yet, and a number were known to exist within Star Force. The red tails was one of them, and every successful attempt they made to break out of the prison she was there to subdue them. They had tried to harm her, even a little, but she left them no openings to exploit, and it was said she never left the prison to do battle elsewhere. She was their constant curse, and the Neofan here hated her the most out of their enemies. If Kelmaran could trade his life for a chance to kill her, he would take it without hesitation…and many had tried, and failed, to do so.
Most had given up trying, but every now and then they’d attempt to escape just to fight the boredom. They were confined in a series of buildings they had free run of, given food and clothing if they wished it, but all the Neofan denied the clothing. They would not wear the Star Force garments, and only ate the food because they had no other options.
So they sat, or paced, with it seeming to be a failure of the Star Force prison system early on. There was no punishment, no interrogation, no labor, nothing of value to Star Force. They just kept them here for seemingly no reason, offering to teach them the Star Force ways but not attempting to compel it, but Kelmaran had been wrong. They had one powerful weapon here, and it was the boredom.
A few of the Neofan had cracked and started using the automated training facilities. At first they said it was for information gathering, and then they suggested that if they got access to other areas of the prison they might be able to find a way to escape from
