The news hit the colony like a physical blow. Warlord Kael. Orbital bombardment. Forty eight hours. Panic was a living thing, coiling in the pit of every stomach. Captain Tipon Reyes stood on the central comms platform. The sea of faces looking up at him was a tapestry of fear. He could not lie to them. He would not.
"Kael is coming," Tipon's voice cut through the murmurs, amplified by a trickle of mana. "His fleet will be here in two days. Their orders are not to land. Their orders are to burn this world from the sky."
A wail of despair rose from the crowd. A man fell to his knees. The hope they had scraped together from the fungal forest cache evaporated into the thin Keplerian air.
Tipon slammed a fist on the railing. The sound echoed like a gunshot. "But we are not dead yet!" he roared, his Defiant Will flaring. A wave of resolve washed over the colonists, pushing back the edge of their terror. "We have two days. We have this." He gestured to the land around them. "And we have each other. We will not make it easy for them. We will dig, we will hide, and we will fight for every breath!"
His system interface pulsed with a new, desperate quest.
> Main Quest: Scorched Sky Protocol.
> Objective: Survive the Orbital Purge. Evacuate the primary colony. Establish a hidden secondary base.
> Reward: +2 Levels, Colony Evolution: Nomadic Phase, Kael's Fleet Signature Data.
> Failure: Colony Annihilation.
The hook was set. Survival was no longer about building a home. It was about becoming ghosts.
"Zubin!" Tipon barked. "I need you and Zeta to work a miracle. Use that lander's comms array. Find us a way to blind them. Create sensor ghosts, false thermal signatures, anything to confuse their targeting systems."
Zubin nodded, his face pale but determined. "We can bounce signals off the moons. Create the illusion of multiple colonies. It will not hold under close scrutiny, but it might buy time."
"Irina," Tipon turned to her. "Your weaves. Can you hide us? Can you make this colony disappear under a canopy?"
Irina's eyes glowed with fierce concentration. "The forest fungi respond to me. I can coax them to grow over the hab domes. I can weave a canopy that masks our heat signatures. But it will take every ounce of my power. I will need help."
"Then you will have it," Tipon said. "Liana, organize every able bodied person. We are moving. We are stripping this site. Anything we cannot carry, we bury. We leave no trace that we were ever here."
The following thirty six hours were a blur of frantic, desperate labor. The colony transformed from a settlement into a caravan. Rovers were loaded with seed banks, water purifiers, and the precious bio printer. The forge was dismantled. The hab domes were collapsed and camouflaged.
Irina stood at the center of the old colony site. Her hands were pressed to the soil. Vines and glowing fungi surged at her command. They crawled over metal and plastic, swallowing the structures whole. The air hummed with bio energy. She was not just hiding them. She was convincing the planet itself to protect them.
High above, Zubin and Zeta worked in the gutted lander. Screens flickered with complex algorithms. Zeta's form phased in and out of reality, patching circuits with its bare hands.
"I have isolated Kael's flagship, the Iron Will," Zeta reported. "Its sensor patterns are aggressive but predictable. I am creating three decoy signatures. They will appear as large energy sources in different locations."
"Will it work?" Zubin asked, his fingers flying across the keyboard.
"It will work for the initial bombardment pass," Zeta stated. "They will waste their first volley on empty desert. It will not work a second time."
Meanwhile, Tipon led a scout team to a deep canyon system ten kilometers away. It was a jagged scar in the planet's surface, its depths shrouded in perpetual shadow. It was perfect.
"Here," Tipon said, his voice echoing off the stone walls. "This will be our new home. For now."
They worked through the night. The caravan of rovers snaked into the canyon under the cover of darkness. Pre fabricated shelters were assembled in hidden crevices. The bio printer was set up in a deep cave, its soft hum a promise of continued life.
Dawn on the second day arrived. The sky was a clear, cruel blue. The colony was gone, hidden under a living blanket of forest. The canyon base was operational, a nervous heart beating in the planet's depths.
Tipon stood with his core team on a high ridge, looking at the empty sky. They were all exhausted. Their mana and vitality pools were low.
"They are here," Zeta said, its voice flat.
A pinprick of light appeared in the upper atmosphere. Then another. And another. They grew into the menacing shapes of Biobot frigates. The lead ship, the Iron Will, was a dagger of black metal.
"Decoys are active," Zubin whispered, as if the machines could hear him.
For a long, agonizing minute, nothing happened. The ships hung in the sky, silent and judging.
Then, the Iron Will's hull glowed. A dozen points of brilliant white light gathered along its spine. With a silent, terrifying flash, lances of plasma streaked down from the heavens. They struck the decoy locations miles away. The ground erupted. Fountains of molten rock and vaporized sand geysered into the sky. The shockwave hit the ridge moments later, a hot, dry wind that carried the smell of ozone and death.
Tipon watched, his knuckles white. They had taken the bait.
But the Iron Will did not leave. It began a slow, methodical sweep.
"They are scanning for secondary targets," Zeta reported. "Their sensors are recalibrating. They know the first strike was a deception."
"Can your canopy hold?" Tipon asked Irina, his voice tight.
She nodded, sweat beading on her forehead. "As long as I can. The forest is strong. It wants to live."
The Biobot ships continued their sweep. A frigate broke from the formation. It moved directly towards the location of their old, hidden colony.
"It is targeting the forest," Zubin said, his voice cracking with panic.
The frigate's ventral cannons glowed. A single, precise plasma bolt lanced down. It struck the center of the forest Irina had woven. The impact was not as violent as the first, but it was more horrifying. A wave of fire spread out from the impact point. The beautiful, glowing fungi blackened and died. The protective canopy began to wither.
Irina cried out, stumbling back. "They are burning it! I can feel it dying!"
Tipon caught her. He felt her pain through their Bio Link. The forest's death was her own.
"The energy signature is dropping," Zeta said. "The fire is consuming the biomass. Our camouflage is failing."
The Iron Will turned its attention. Its sensors had found the truth. It began to move, positioning itself directly over the burning forest. Its main cannon began to charge again. This strike would not be for deception. It would be for annihilation.
"We have to do something!" Liana shouted.
Tipon's mind raced. His eyes fell on Zeta. "The lander. Its power core. Can we overload it? Make it look like a weapon?"
Zubin's eyes widened. "Yes! If we trigger a core meltdown, the energy spike will be massive. It will look like a shield generator overloading, or a weapon firing. It might draw their fire!"
"Do it!" Tipon ordered.
Zeta phased away without a word. A minute later, a new, violent energy signature bloomed on the sensors from the heart of the burning forest. The lander's core went critical.
The Iron Will hesitated. Its targeting systems swung from the hidden canyon to the new, threatening energy source. It was a calculated risk. A potential weapon was a higher priority than a hidden colony.
The flagship fired.
A pillar of pure energy consumed the lander, the forest, and everything for a kilometer around. The ground shook. When the light faded, a new, glassy crater sat where their first home had been.
The Biobot fleet hung in the sky for another hour, scanning. They found nothing. No life signs. No energy readings. Just a dead forest and a glassed crater.
Finally, the ships turned. They ascended, piercing the atmosphere and disappearing into the black.
Silence fell.
They had survived. But the cost was written in the smoke on the horizon. Their first home was gone. Irina wept quietly for the forest she had lost.
Tipon put a hand on her shoulder. His system chimed.
> Main Quest Updated: Scorched Sky Protocol.
> Objective Complete: Survive the Orbital Purge.
> Reward: +2 Levels. Tipon Reyes is now Level 5.
> Strength +2, Agility +2, Mana +3.
> New Skill Unlocked: Void Cloak (Temporary personal invisibility).
> Colony Evolution: Nomadic Phase Initiated.
He looked at his team, their faces smudged with soot and etched with fatigue. They were alive. They were hunted. They were angry.
The war was no longer about defiance. It was about vengeance.