"What the heck!?" Jax shrieked, grabbing fistfuls of his own hair, his eyes shaking wildly. "We're getting invaded for real!? Weren't we supposed to be part of a super powerful megacorporation!? Where the hell is Nexum Dynamic now!?"
His panic was a mirror of the terror clawing up Vance's throat. But as Vance stared at the sky, now dominated by the graceful, terrible shapes of the Kaelzar warships, a cold, sickening realization settled in his gut. This wasn't just an invasion. It was a reckoning. And their corporate overlords had clearly already written them off as a loss.
The Kaelzar's ultimatum hung in the air like a digital sword of Damocles over the entire hive city. In the pressurized silence that followed, the planet's provisional government, cut off from their Planetary Champion by relentless jamming and led by a governor whose fanaticism for Nexum Dynamics bordered on religious zeal, made their choice. The order crackled through every emergency channel... Fight.
